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Motorola picks Linux for phone of the future

From The Register

The fact that Motorola is selling its stake in Symbian (the corporation) doesn't mean that Motorola is stopping selling Symbian (the software) in its phones.

But it does mean that Motorola thinks the future in phone software is elsewhere. Linux, to be precise.

The company will be carrying on with its licensing of Symbian, with a Symbian-based 3G phone, the A920, shipping in the next weeks into the UK. But the Chinese Government's focus is on Linux, and they expect to see Linux as the operating system in everything.

Not only is China potentially, the world's largest mobile phone market, but it's also where most phones are built.

Even more significantly, it's where the next generation of all mobile devices will be based, thinks Motorola; a small empire called Linux, China will rule the world.

Back in July, the "Open PDA" was announced as a joint venture, by Motorola and Metrowerks - a software tool maker which Motorola owns - for the i.MX1 microprocessor. Open PDA is a development solution based on Linux, "for the creation of next generation wireless devices".

"The platform and silicon combine to help developers significantly shorten design cycles and speed time to market," Motorola said at the time, failing to mention the low royalty fees involved.

"The OpenPDA Development Studio for the Motorola i.MX1 eliminates the need for manual integration of the kernel, device drivers, applications and middleware required for the creation of wireless devices," said the July announcement.

The processor is yet another ARM derivative, already a player in the PDA market. But if the partnership with the Chinese Government takes off, the OpenPDA could take over from both PocketPC and Palm.

Right now, Motorola is sticking to the one universal platform - Java - which runs on all existing phones and PDAs, whatever OS - and that's the angle the corporate publicity spin suggests. It's true: in February, Motorola announced its first Linux-powered handset, which uses Java technology. It has done a deal with Microsoft, though no phone has appeared yet - but when it does, it will support Java apps. And it is carrying on with the Java-supporting Symbian phone range. But what matters, is Linux.

The deal with Symbian is simple enough; Motorola owns nearly 20 per cent, and Nokia is expected to buy the majority of that, while Psion, the parent of Symbian, will buy the rest. ®

U.S. Muslims Set Political Agenda

From CBS News

National Muslim leaders at their largest convention of the year announced plans to register 1 million Muslim voters and make civil rights a top issue in any endorsement of a presidential candidate.

*Muddy Says* Um.. were you guys around in the 60's when the civil rights movement was happening, I think your off a few decades.
When they say civil rights, are they talking about the right to take flying lessons?
--END--

Muslim leaders made their first unified endorsement in a presidential race in 2000, backing George W. Bush. Many thought he would take a harder line against Israel, and, based on statements he made while campaigning, would protect the rights of immigrants facing deportation.

Muslims say they have been bitterly disappointed on both counts.

*Muddy Says* Yea.. ok lets think about this one. Side with God's Chosen people, or a group of wack jobs [speaking of Hamas and any nut job who agrees with them] who want all Jews and Americans to die. Well call me crazy but that's not a real hard choice there boys.
--End--

Investigators Probe Bizarre Bomb Death of Pizza Man

From FOXNews.com

Joey Porter resting comfortably after shooting

From Pittsburgh Steelers

PITTSBURGH - Steelers linebacker Joey Porter is resting comfortably in a Denver hospital after he was shot outside of an establishment there.

Porter, who went to Colorado State, was in Denver to attend the Colorado-Colorado State game. He was standing outside of an establishment when a drive-by shooting occurred and he was hit by a stray bullet.

"Joey was an innocent bystander hit by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting," said head coach Bill Cowher. "A total of six people were injured in this drive-by shooting; one was shot fatally. This being a homicide, I can not disclose any more information at this time.
Linebacker Joey Porter is resting comfortably after being shot.

"The bullet entered his left buttocks and is lodged in his right thigh. All the tests are being done and at this time it looks as though the bullet did not hit any vital organs. He is resting comfortably in the hospital and we are in the process, barring any setbacks, of trying to fly him back here tomorrow. At that point we will do further tests and further information will be available as we get it."

Cowher spoke with Porter earlier in the day on Sunday.

"He is doing as well as can be expected," said Cowher. "He feels like he let the football team down. He was very emotional at the time. I talked to him and his wife. He begged me not to put him on IR."

Porter is one of the leaders on the field, and it's not surprising that even though he was an innocent by-stander that he felt like he let his teammates down.

"It's just the nature of the feeling," said Cowher. "I think any time anybody goes through something like that; that's just the type of person he is. He is a very unselfish individual. He has put a lot of effort into this season and into where we are. He was very disappointed at the time and probably very emotional at the time. I think that's very understandable."

The players were given the weekend off after the final preseason game in Carolina on Friday night, before having to return Monday to begin preparing for the Ravens game. Porter headed to Denver for the game, and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"There are shootings that take place around our city and a lot of innocent people are getting hit," said Cowher. "It's very unfortunate. It's the unfortunate part of our society that's taking place. When high profile people are in that situation, it comes to light. Unfortunately these things are happening daily and a lot of innocent people are having to suffer through it."

Cowher said that the incident will not be a distraction as the team prepares for the Ravens.

"We're a family," said Cowher. "Any time something like this hits your family; I know Joey won't want this to be a distraction and I don't think it will be. If anything this will draw us closer together. I think that's how you should respond as a family. Him being an integral part of that, that's the type of effect it will have on our team.

"Joey's going to be back. He'll be fine. He's a special guy. He'll be back."

Despite the situation Cowher did try to shed some positive light on it.

"As I told Joey, I am glad we are having this conversation because there is one member who is not talking to anybody today," said Cowher. "You have to keep things in perspective.

"He is a lucky young man. That is the perspective we have to have at this time."

Clark Haggans would start if Porter is unable to play on Sunday.

"He had a very good camp," said Cowher. "That's why he's here. He's an established guy. He's a very good linebacker."

Mosque Bombing Rocks Quest for Iraq Stability

President Bush returns from vacation on Saturday. With his re-election fight just a year away, analysts say he must act quickly to calm fears that Iraq is turning sour.

The third major bombing there this month left a field of potential culprits as wide as the Baghdad attacks on the embassy of Jordan, an Arab friend of the United States, and on the headquarters of the United Nations, to which Washington is increasingly looking to share the burden of postwar occupation.

Some analysts say all three could be the work of anti-U.S. forces out to wreck Bush's efforts to create a friendly Iraq. Friday's blast could also have quite different roots, however.

At least 75 people were killed and about double that number wounded in the explosion at the Imam Ali mosque in the holy city of Najaf, south of the capital. It is the most sacred site for Shi'ites, who form a 60 percent majority of Iraq's population.

Supporters of the slain Ayatollah Hakim, 63, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) which has been cooperating with the U.S. authorities, blamed diehard loyalists of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, under whose largely secular rule the Shi'ites were heavily oppressed.

SCIRI, once fostered by the anti-American Shi'ite rulers of neighboring Iran, had taken a pragmatic approach to dealing with the U.S. occupation, taking up a seat on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council as a first step toward self rule.

FACTION FIGHTING

Similar shadowy groups, possibly operating in concert with foreign Islamists from the likes of al Qaeda, were widely blamed for the Jordanian and U.N. attacks, as well as the killings of dozens of U.S. and British soldiers since the war in April.

As worrying for the prospects of stability in the nation of 26 million may be the accusations in some quarters that the Najaf bombing was another symptom of bitter faction fighting among Shi'ite leaders. One cleric, like Hakim newly returned from exile, was hacked to death in the same mosque in April.

A relative of Hakim was wounded in a bomb attack last week, spurring accusations against another Shi'ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, who has criticized the U.S. occupation in strong terms. Sadr, a youthful radical, denies involvement in the violence.

"It's a blow to (U.S.-led) coalition efforts to encourage moderate Shi'ites," said Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Britain's Warwick University. "It's also a dire and public warning to all Iraqis with links to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and a drive to heighten sectarian tensions."

The Shi'ites, predominant in areas south of Baghdad, are looking to U.S. plans for representative democracy to give them the upper hand in Iraq after centuries of repression.

But mindful of the big non-Shi'ite minority, Washington is anxious to ensure the Shi'ites' numbers do not create problems, notably with the Sunni Arabs to the north of the capital, where much of the anti-American, pro-Saddam violence is concentrated. U.S. officials have also made clear they will oppose those Shi'ite clerics whose idea of democracy is clerical rule like that in Shi'ite Iran, still on Washington's "axis of evil" list.

WASHINGTON DEFIANT

Bush's administration, facing new questions at home over the wisdom of occupying Iraq in defiance of many of Washington's closest allies, insisted that the worst carnage since the fall of Saddam in early April would not deter them.

"We remain resolved to defeat terrorism and continue to work to bring a better life for the Iraqi people," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said of the Najaf bombing.

The United States, as the main occupying power, is ultimately responsible under international law for security in Iraq. But a State Department official said the Iraqi Interior Ministry would be the lead agency in the investigation.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a separate statement, did not mention the United States at all. He said:

"As success during this period of transition continues to mount, the opponents of success and of a free Iraq may continue their desperate acts. But the outcome is not in doubt."

Bush is keen for other nations to step forward and help U.S. forces in Iraq but has been resisting calls from opponents of the war, such as France, Russia and Germany, that Washington hand over much of the responsibility for the country to the U.N.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had drafted a new U.N. resolution on the issue, which had been discussed with Berlin and with Secretary of State Colin Powell:

"Our positions on this are getting closer," Putin said.

France and Russia called for a quick return to Iraqi rule.

Friday's blast tore through worshippers as they streamed out of prayers where Ayatollah Hakim had been preaching. It left rescuers scrabbling through the rubble for body parts.

Thousands of Shi'ites waving banners and pictures of Hakim later marched through Baghdad, many beating themselves in grief at the cleric's death. The Governing Council issued a statement calling for three days of mourning from Saturday.

Fantastic Pic's of our Universe and Beyond

Hubble Takes Mars up on Photo Op

Fear of US Attack Forced NK to Come to Negotiating Table

From KoreaTimes

A Chinese scholar who is also a key Communist Party member in Shanghai, has said Chinese President Hu Jintao through his top envoy informed North Korean leader Kim Jong-il of a possible United States invasion.

Shen Dingli, professor at Hudan University in Shanghai and who was visiting Korea for an international seminar, was quoted by sources as saying that Hu’s message was very clear about the possibility of U.S. military action against the communist country that is defying international calls to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Attending a workshop held on the sideline of the 12th Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations last week, the Chinese expert on international relations said, ``Hu told Kim, `If you make a problem, the U.S. will attack you. Don’t expect any help from us.’’’

He said that words of advice by the leader of Pyongyang’s only ally apparently scared the North Korean leader into accommodating Beijing’s suggestion that Pyongyang should engage in talks with the U.S. under whatever format.

During Pyongyang’s June 25, 1950, invasion of the South and the ensuing three-year war, China sent tens of thousands of soldiers to help the North avoid being overwhelmed by United Nations forces.

Kim is widely known to be afraid of U.S. military might and an attack on his impoverished country, which, according to some experts, has pushed it to develop nuclear weapons in the first place.

However, Shen didn’t specify who carried the message but said it was delivered by a senior Chinese official about a month ago.

At least three senior Chinese officials have recently visited Pyongyang. They are Army Chief Political Commissar Xu Caihou, and Vice Foreign Ministers Dai Bingguo and Wang Yi.

Hu’s message came at a time when the North apparently underwent a change of heart and became more accommodating to multilateral dialogue involving not only the U.S. and China, but also South Korea, Japan and Russia. In April, Pyongyang and Washington held the first and only round of three-way talks, with Beijing playing host, after the North’s admission of having a nuclear weapons program.

The negotiations, however, failed to progress as the North demanded that it would conduct direct discussions with the U.S. for a non-aggression pact, while Washington refused.

In connection, the U.S. cable channel CNN reported in an online report that Hu delivered an ultimatum to the North Korean leader, calling on him to adopt a Chinese-style open-door policy, halt its development of weapons of mass destruction and improve relations with neighbors.

Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a CNN analyst, said in the article that Hu’s message forced Kim to send a delegation to the first-round of six-way talks that begin in Beijing today.

New Telescope Rocks!

I was surfing nasa's web site and found this awesome image of our sun taken this morning.

Images @ NASA.gov here

DirectX attack expected - Switch To Linux Now

From ZDNet UK

Following last week's MSBlast worm attack, security experts at Microsoft and other firms are worried that a recently discovered vulnerability in DirectX could cause even more problems


Microsoft seems to have survived the MSBlast worm attack, but now the company is urging Windows users to patch their systems against a different, potentially more dangerous, vulnerability in its software.

Even though most businesses have installed the patch for MSBlast, there is another vulnerability that could completely overshadow last week's events. On 23 July Microsoft posted a security bulletin on its Web site that describes a "critical" vulnerability in DirectX. According to Microsoft, unprotected systems could be at the mercy of an attacker by simply playing a midi file or visiting a malicious Web page.

The danger comes, says Microsoft, in a component of DirectX that relies on a library file called quartz.dll, which is used by a number of applications -- including Internet Explorer -- to play midi files. A specially designed midi file could cause a buffer overflow error and either pass control of the system to an attacker, cause damage to the system or use the system to set off another MSBlast-type attack.

Russ Cooper, chief scientist at security company TruSecure, expects a worm or virus to take advantage of the vulnerability in the near future: "We are definitely afraid of the DirectX vulnerability." The vulnerability, he said, is very widespread because few people have applied the patch for this. Cooper believes it could be exploited by a worm that uses several methods of spreading, similar to the way that MSBlast did.

Graeme Pinkney, analysis operations manager at security company Symantec, said that because the time between vulnerabilities being discovered and exploits being written is decreasing, users have less time to learn about new vulnerabilities and update their systems. "The DirectX vulnerability does have the potential to be exploited, but there are around seven new vulnerabilities found in computer software everyday. Vulnerabilities become a critical issue only when an exploit is released," he said.

Stuart Okin, chief security officer at Microsoft UK, told ZDNet UK: "My real worry is about a more destructive trojan coming on to people's machines. They need to patch their systems, but more importantly, put into place the automatic update. There will be patches that fix problems that are just as large as [MSBlast]," he said. The DirectX patch is available from Microsoft's Web site.

A secure version of DirectX (9.0b) for all Windows versions -- except NT4 -- was released in late July.

Last week's worm attack coincided with the Microsoft.com Web site falling over on at least two separate occasions, but the company denies that these faults had anything to do with the worm, which was designed to launch a denial of service attack on the windowsupdate.com domain.

"Microsoft.com went down briefly, but that was a completely different denial of service attack and had nothing to do with the worm," said Okin, who admitted there were a few "flickers" on the Windows Update service as millions of users updated their systems. "It has often been much slower than usual, but it generally handled the traffic without many problems."

Okin said that early estimates indicate traffic on the Microsoft Web site doubled last week when more than 80 million people downloaded the patch. The company also saw the number of calls to its helpline increase 1,400 percent, from 2,000 calls a day to more than 30,000.

NASA Launches New Space-Based Telescope

From NewYork Times & nasa.gov

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug. 25 — The last in the series of NASA's "Great Observatories" streaked into a starry sky early this morning, reaching its intended orbit around the Sun less than an hour later.

Called Sirtf (pronounced SIRT-ef), short for Space Infrared Telescope Facility, the $700 million satellite will scan the cosmic abyss for infant stars and other relatively lukewarm objects hidden by the dusty cores of our galaxy as well as others, some as distant as 10 billion light-years.

"These objects are far away; it takes the light a long time to get to us, so we're seeing them when they were young," said Dr. Michael Werner, the spacecraft project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're looking back in time as well as back in space."

Sirtf's three scientific instruments will be chilled to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit (right above absolute zero) by a hefty reserve of liquid helium. The telescope's three-foot-wide mirror will enable scientists to detect celestial bodies like young stars still encircled by a blend of gases, dust and other matter that one day may coalesce into planets. The search will include failed stars, also known as brown dwarfs.

NASA hopes observations will go on for two and a half years and possibly twice as long. The launching was delayed more than a year because of problems with the spacecraft and its Delta 2 rocket.

"Sirtf will be following the Earth around the Sun, kind of like a faithful puppy," Dr. Werner said.

Sirtf will also make it possible to study frigid worlds like Pluto and its moon, Charon. They are considered part of the Kuiper belt, a sort of boundary of the solar system populated by more than a million icy bodies.

Without Sirtf, these objects would be just too cold, dim and distant to be observed, said Dr. Dale Cruikshank of NASA. About half of the comets seen in the solar system come from the Kuiper belt, he said.

Cross State Taxing

I was reading over the construction tonight and discovered a fatal flaw in the new law the government is trying to pass. In case you've not heard about it they are trying to force us to pay taxes on items we buy on the internet. So if you buy something from a shop in NYC and you live in a state that is not NY, you would have to pay NY State tax on it.

Well it seems the U.S. Constitution has the following to say about that.

Article I
Section 9
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."
I'm interested to see how they proceed even more now. :-)

Alabama Chief Justice Suspended

From FOXNews.com

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has defied a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state's Judicial Building, was suspended Friday by a judicial ethics panel.

A federal judge had decided the 5,300-pound granite marker violated the Constitution's ban on government promotion of a religious doctrine.

Moore was automatically suspended with pay when the nine-member Judicial Inquiry Commission referred the ethics complaint against him to the Court of the Judiciary, which holds trial-like proceedings and can discipline and remove judges.

• Raw Data: Complaint Against Moore (pdf)

Ruby Crowe, an assistant clerk working with the court, said Moore would have 30 days to respond.

The Commandments monument "will be taken out very soon," said state Attorney General Bill Pryor on Fox News' "DaySide." "We have an obligation to uphold the rule of law."

Moore met with the commission early Friday as about 100 of his supporters, several blocks away at the federal courthouse, ripped and burned a copy of U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson's order for the monument's removal.

Moore said he told the commission that he upheld his oath of office by acknowledging God. Moore has said Thompson has no authority to tell the state's chief justice to remove the monument.

"What this federal judge has said is that we cannot acknowledge God," Moore told Fox News Friday. "My battle is not with the justices of the court, my colleagues, my battle is with the federal government, who has come in and told us how to think, who we can believe in."

Moore had no immediate comment after his suspension was announced. His spokesman, Tom Parker, said Moore's attorneys would respond to the complaint Monday.

• Video: Interview With Roy Moore

Pryor said the public corruption and white collar crime unit in his office would handle the prosecution of Moore, who cannot perform any judicial duties while disqualified. Pryor said senior Associate Justice Gorman Houston would perform the chief justice's duties.

"I'm not happy we have to deal with these matters, but it is part of our duties and we will continue to do so," said Pryor.

Thompson ruled last year that the monument, installed by Moore in a highly visible public spot in the Alabama Judicial Building, violates the Constitution's ban on government promotion of a religious doctrine, but added that it could be moved to a private place in the building.

Thompson had ordered the monument removed by Wednesday — the same day the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Moore's appeal for an emergency stay. Moore has said he plans to file a formal appeal with the high court.

"I respect whatever it is that they (the ethics panel) do," said Stephen Glassroth, the Montgomery lawyer who filed the complaint against Moore.

The Court of the Judiciary, currently made up of four judges, three lawyers and two non-lawyers, has handled numerous judicial ethics cases.

Meanwhile, attorneys who sued to get the monument out of the rotunda put their contempt filing against Moore on hold, now that Alabama Supreme Court associate justices have agreed to move the marker.

Moore supporters' around-the-clock vigil near the monument continued in downtown Montgomery. They have prayed, sung hymns, preached and kept an eye on the monument through the building's glass doors since Wednesday's deadline.

On Friday, about 100 protesters moved from the steps of the judicial building to a sidewalk in front of the federal courthouse, where Thompson works. Some ripped a copy of Thompson's ruling to pieces and burned it. Demonstrators also held a mock trial, in which Thompson was charged with breaking the law of God.

"We hold you, Judge Thompson, and the United States Supreme Court in contempt of God's law," said Flip Benham, director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

Inside the state judicial building, court officials were trying to determine where the monument would go and when it would be moved.

Ayesha Khan, an attorney for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the groups seeking removal of the monument, said Thompson told the parties in a conference call Friday that he would schedule another conference call for late next week. She said plaintiffs would drop their request to hold Moore in contempt, or fine the state, if the monument was moved by then.

"Our concern all along has been compliance with the Constitution. Once the monument has been removed, our concerns will have been addressed," she said.

Khan said Pryor, speaking for the eight associate justices who overruled Moore, told Thompson that building officials were looking for the best location for the monument and considering security problems that might occur because of the ongoing demonstrations.

Thompson's order gave the option of moving the monument to Moore's office. But Khan said she asked Moore during a deposition about moving it to his office and he said the monument was too heavy.

An organizer of pro-Moore demonstrations, Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, said Friday the demonstrations would continue.

He said five protesters would kneel in front of each of the two building exits in order to prevent the monument from being removed.

"Our message is clear. We are going to peacefully block the way if they try to move it," Mahoney said.

One of the demonstrators, retired Birmingham schoolteacher Murray Phillips, said she knows the monument will probably be gone from the rotunda soon.

"I'm upset, but I'm not surprised. At least I am going to be able to say to my grandchildren that at least I tried to do something," Phillips said.

Stupid News Questions

Listening to NPR's morning addition Sunday I heard a pretty dumb, yet funny question.
The interviewer was talking to a Judge and asked, "Judge, you deal with lawyers a lot". I about fell out of my chair laughing, hmm... a judge dealing with lawyers, that's unheard of. (sarcasm)

Not much else to say, just another example of ignorant reporters wasting my time asking stupid questions.

Muddy Gets a Nasty Gram! WooHoo!

Well, it seems some tool on the linux forum I frequent does not like the quote in my signature.

So he sent me a nasty gram that has an underlying tone of mental instability.
I tried to respond with some helpful thoughts but alas his email address seems to be a fake one, nice.
Send me a nasty gram and then don't even have the "manhood" to allow a reply, very sad indeed.

Well in such a time as this I'll post it up here unedited in hopes he visits so I have the equal opportunity to respond to his thoughts.

Seeing as he was so thoughtful as to point out grammar and formatting errors in my quote I thought it only fair for me to point out he misspelled "browsing" and "eighth".

Enjoy :-)

Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 16:29:43 -0400
From: amentet
[ Add to Address Book | Block Address | Report as Spam ]
To:
Subject: Stupidity in the form of...quotes

This is a message from amentet at LinuxQuestions.org ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/index.php ). The LinuxQuestions.org owners cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of the email.

To email amentet, you can use this online form:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/member.php?action=mailform&userid=35470

OR, by email:
mailto:amentet@invaliddomain.com

This is the message:

As I was browing through the forums today, I saw a post by you, and your signature which read: "Windows is good for the mindless drones of the world. Those who are not able to think for themselves, or who don't care to think for themselves." -Muddy

Now, besides this being the most ignorant anti-MS BS i have -ever- heard, it's coming from someone named Muddy. Don't get me wrong, i won't dislike you for using such a name, but I will dislike you for being so blatantly stupid. "don't care to think for themselves" is commonly used, so it belongs in your stupid, uncreative quote.

Quoting yourself is genius, it shows your superiority, especially over those windows users. And when you can stereotype a massive amount of people as well, I applaud. Acting like you're better than people because you use a different OS is not only sad, but pointless. An open source OS like Linux is used to get stuff done, not to be a step higher than those inferior "drones" who might use an Windows to be productive, or to have fun.

I'm also guessing you're a mandrake user, which would put you half a step above a windows user, if I was rating people based on their OS, because a 10 year old could install mandrake. He could also make a quote as bad as yours.

I guess it's a lesson learned, give a 14 year old a computer and he'll use it to quote himself. At least I HOPE you're not older than 14, if you are, you're s-t-u-p-i-d, so don't preach to me about how you're 21, I'll just laugh at you.

Oh, and my FAVORITE part about your idiotic quote is the fact that it doesn't even make sense, which goes along well with my theory that you're 14. If you had passed eigth grade english, you would realize that 'those who don't think for themselves, or don't care to think for themselves' is a FRAGMENT! So your quote truly shows your ignorance.

Next time you decide you want to insult the masses, keep it in your small head, we don't want your superiority complex getting out of hand.

Insulted by your stupid remarks,
Byron a.k.a Amentet
p.s. Check out my quote, it's loosely based on yours.

Cowher names Zereoue, Riemersma as Starters

From Steelers.com

Amos Zereoue will be the team's starting running back when the Steelers open the season against Baltimore on Sept. 7 at Heinz Field. Coach Bill Cowher also named Jay Riemersma the starting tight end.

LATROBE - Making what he described as "a gut decision," Coach Bill Cowher said at a Thursday news conference that Amos Zereoue would open the season as the starting running back and Jay Riemersma would open as the starting tight end.

Cowher said he came to the decision last Monday, two days after the Steelers' second preseason game, and that's when he informed Zereoue and Jerome Bettis, and Riemersma and Mark Bruener of the decision.

"We will use Jerome and Amos a lot," said Cowher. "Both of them will play, and hopefully we'll be able to keep them fresh all year. But we don't have any preconceived notions. Whoever is running the best will play.

"I just made a gut decision. It wasn't a case where one guy outplayed the other. Both guys will play. This position is not like quarterback. You can alternate running backs."

Cowher said that Riemersma has done well in his first camp with the Steelers, and while he didn't mention Jerame Tuman's groin injury, that also had to be a factor in his decision at tight end.

As for the other position battle on offense -- right tackle -- Cowher said Oliver Ross will start Thursday's game against Dallas, with Todd Fordham also working with the first unit. Cowher said the two players could alternate ever couple of series against the Cowboys, because "somebody needs to step up."

The starting safeties will be Mike Logan and Brent Alexander, and Cowher indicated that would be the case for the opener on Sept. 7 against Baltimore. Verron Haynes was cited as a player who has taken advantage of opportunities so far this preseason, and he will get more of them as the third-down back.

Kendall Simmons will start at right guard against the Cowboys. As for how long he'd play, Cowher said, "We'll see how he feels. His strength isn't all the way back."

The Steelers now have completed their 2003 training camp, and Cowher gave it mixed reviews. He acknowledged that it's difficult to leave any camp with the notion that everything got accomplished, and he admitted that the persistent rain and subsequently soggy fields were a bit of a distraction. But he also closed camp with a punitive move.

He canceled the annual rookie show, which is typically held on the final night of camp.

"I canceled the rookie show, because I didn't feel we were focused on this game," said Cowher.

INJURY NOTES: Ruled out of the game against the Cowboys were Tuman, Jason Gildon (knee), Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala (hamstring) and Tim Levcik (knee). Cowher said Tuman and Fuamatu-Ma'afala will run for the first time on Friday, and that's when the team will have a better idea of when they might return. Cowher said Gildon could've played against the Cowboys if it were a regular season game.

Fear, uncertainty and Linux

From Salon.com

SCO claims IBM and Linux have ripped off its old program code. Linux advocates say that's bunk. Nothing will become clear until SCO shows its hand in court.

By Farhad Manjoo

Aug. 18, 2003 | "There is perhaps not the same level of interest in this case as in that of the O.J. Simpson trial," says Gordon Haff, a technology analyst who's been closely following the multibillion-dollar lawsuit that the SCO Group, a small Utah software firm, filed against IBM in March. Cable news networks are not clamoring to cover every development in the complex contract dispute. "I do not expect to see it on Court TV anytime soon," Haff says.

But in open-source software circles, SCO's suit has achieved trial-of-the-century status. SCO owns the copyrights to decades-old Unix code, and it has accused IBM of secretly stuffing this code into Linux, thereby making Linux "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." To fans of Linux, SCO's claims seem at once preposterous and dangerous, and the lawsuit has set the community buzzing: Rhe press (embodied by the likes of Slashdot and Linux Journal) is all over it, the pundits are in high gear, everyone believes himself an expert on the issue, and, like the best celebrity trials, the whole thing keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

On Aug. 5, SCO made its boldest claim yet: Because the company believes that everyone using Linux is illegally using SCO's technology, the company released a price list detailing how much money Linux users should pay SCO if they want to continue using their beloved open-source OS without facing any legal troubles. SCO wants $199 for every desktop computer running Linux and $699 for every server (though that price will rise to $1,399 in October).

According to SCO, these prices are reasonable -- Linux is, after all, a pretty good operating system. "We compared Linux to our Unixware product," says Blake Stowell, a company spokesman, referring to SCO's Unix-based server system. Since Unixware sells for $1,400, SCO determined that a Linux server at $700 would be a steal.

But wouldn't Linux users balk at paying hundreds of dollars to use an operating system they'd long believed was free? SCO is unmoved by this question. To the people who thought they could get a good operating system for nothing, "I guess all I can say is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," Stowell says.

According to SCO, many major corporations have expressed interest in buying its Linux licenses, and one firm, a Fortune 500 company that SCO says "recognizes the importance of paying for SCO's intellectual property," even purchased licenses for its Linux servers. Blake Stowell says that terms of the deal prevent SCO from naming the company or disclosing how much money it paid, but he notes that SCO considers the amount "significant -- it was not a small number." He adds that he's confident that the company will soon announce more sales, and "hopefully we'll be able to name some of those companies." On Thursday, SCO announced that during the third quarter of 2003, it made more than $7 million from its efforts to license its Unix code.

News that SCO has made some money selling rights to its code failed to convince many of its critics that the company has a valid case against Linux. "I think it's amusing that they were willing to put out a press release for one licensee, and on top of that it's a licensee who's ashamed of doing business with SCO," says Don Marti, the editor of Linux Journal.

Marti and other critics see the licensing announcement as just one more rhetorical escalation by the company -- just about every week, SCO puts out statements crowing about another apparently trivial "development" in its case, an effort designed, open-source advocates say, to garner ever more public attention for its claim that using Linux is illegal and somehow dangerous. This is particularly galling to Linux devotees since, in their view, SCO has not publicly provided any real evidence of infringing code in Linux.

In the first few months after SCO filed its case, many large firms selling open-source software seemed to be staying out of the imbroglio; even IBM was not very vocal in its defense of Linux. But on Aug. 6, IBM filed a forceful countersuit in the SCO case, charging SCO with violating IBM's own software patents and with causing unnecessary harm to IBM's Unix and Linux businesses.

In an argument that many others in the open-source community have long been making, IBM also noted that because SCO had itself once sold a version of Linux under the GPL (General Public License) for open-source software, it had explicitly disclaimed any rights to all code in Linux. (On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that SCO's lawyers plan to argue that the GPL violates copyright law and is therefore invalid.) On Aug. 4, Red Hat, the top Linux company, also filed suit against SCO. The company claimed that SCO's public comments had damaged Red Hat's business, and it asked a judge to issue a declaratory judgment stating that Red Hat's products do not infringe on any of SCO's copyrights.

The lawsuits -- both the SCO-IBM case and Red Hat's separate suit -- are destined to be long-term affairs, and to the extent that SCO is successful at creating actual uncertainty in the marketplace regarding the legality of Linux, the worries are going to linger. So far, according to almost every reliable expert on the matter, Linux users don't seem to be very nervous. But if SCO keeps up its rhetorical war -- and especially if a few more big firms decide to pay SCO off just to make it go away -- Linux could face some problems in the marketplace. Risk-averse corporations, especially, might think twice about using the system.

"It really wouldn't make sense for a company to rip out its Linux servers and put something else in right now," says Gordon Haff, the tech analyst who contrasted this case with the O.J. trial (Haff works at Illuminata, a research firm in New Hampshire). "But if they're thinking of a Linux rollout a year from now and they're also considering alternatives like Windows and maybe Solaris and others, then they might consider this small risk associated with Linux."

Can IBM, Red Hat and other Linux firms successfully combat SCO's claims in the media? Foes of open-source software -- with Microsoft taking the lead -- have long been saying essentially what SCO says now: If Linux seems too good to be true, maybe it is. Maybe there's a catch to it. Maybe using it could land you in trouble. And maybe paying for your operating system is not such a bad idea after all.

Fear, uncertainty and Linux | 1, 2, 3

It is not quite true, as SCO's opponents say, that the company has refused to provide any proof of its claims. Since June, SCO has been offering to show its code to anyone willing to sign a strict nondisclosure agreement requiring them to keep what SCO presents confidential. But by many accounts, this provision has greatly limited the number of qualified people who can see the code.

According to Ian Lance Taylor, one developer willing to sign the NDA, the contract prevents the signer from revealing anything you see in SCO's presentation, even code that you previously knew about. People who work on Linux, then, would not be able to sign the NDA, "as it easily could prevent them from ever again working on the kernel," Taylor wrote in an account of his visit to SCO's headquarters that was published in Linux Journal in June.

Taylor's article, which was cited in many blogs and discussion sites, has become proof to some people that SCO is blowing smoke. Chris Sontag, a vice president at SCO, showed Taylor two source files -- one he claimed was from SCO's Unix code, and one from Linux. "The identical portions of the code were highlighted," Taylor wrote. "There were indeed substantial similarities in the code: very similar comment text, the same variable names, the same algorithm. There also were some differences, but it seemed quite plausible that both pieces of code came from the same source." But SCO refused to show Taylor a "revision history" of the files, meaning that it was impossible for him to tell which code appeared where first. Was the code in the Linux file taken from the Unix file, or was it the other way around?

Taylor noticed another chink in SCO's argument: "The code is fairly trivial -- the kind of stuff I wrote in school," he wrote in Linux Journal. "The similar portions of the code were some 80 lines or so. Looking around the Net, I found close variants of the code, with the same comments and variable names, in sources other than Linux distributions. The code is not in a central part of the Linux kernel. The code does not appear to have been contributed to Linux by SCO or Caldera. The code exists in current versions of the Linux kernel." (Taylor also added that "SCO's example unsettled me by what it implies. Although in itself trivial, it does suggest that some Linux contributors may have been careless about copyright infringement. That is unfortunate.") In an interview, Taylor said that SCO told him there were many more examples of infringing code, but he wonders, he said, "why they wouldn't lead with their best stuff."

When asked about reactions like Taylor's, Blake Stowell, of SCO, gave a puzzling answer. Many of the people who have been unimpressed by SCO's presentation "have not been developers," he said, and they may not have understood the importance of what they were seeing. (Taylor, in fact, is a developer.) Stowell then pointed to several technology analysts who had seen the code and came away thinking that SCO could possibly have a case -- but none of these people are developers.

One analyst Stowell cited was Laura DiDio, of the Yankee Group. DiDio, a personable woman who has been covering technology for decades, first as a journalist and then as an analyst, says that one of her strengths is that "I call it as I see it -- I have no qualms about criticizing any vendor." And when it comes to companies who have bet their fortunes on Linux and other open-source software, Didio says she sees much to criticize.

"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram," she said in a phone interview from her home in Massachusetts. "Because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"

DiDio did not sign an NDA to see SCO's code -- doing so is against the Yankee Group's policy -- but she says she did give the company her word that she would not violate the terms of the agreement. It is not clear whether she was shown the same code that Taylor was shown, but she was slightly more impressed by what she saw. "It appeared as though the Unix System V code" -- that is, SCO's code -- "complete with the developer notes had been copied and pasted right into Linux," she said. "OK now, that said, that is not empirical proof of anything. It's just what it looked like to me, and they showed us snippets of things, so I can't state with absolute certainty what it meant. But what I came away thinking was that if this is what it appeared to be, then SCO has a credible case."

Taylor and DiDio did not react especially differently to SCO's presentation; they both say that what they saw did not either prove or disprove SCO's case, and they only appear to differ in which side they're more willing to accord the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, it can be said that SCO's case is not cut and dried -- but neither, it seems, will IBM's case be a slam dunk.

But DiDio makes an additional argument: If SCO is right, she says, then Linux customers all over the world could be in hot water. Why, then, aren't IBM, Red Hat and other Linux vendors addressing this apparent risk with their customers? She notes that "neither IBM nor Red Hat are offering their customers any indemnification" -- that is, insurance against the lawsuits threatened by SCO or, for that matter, any other company that might come along at some point to claim that Linux might be infringing on a copyright. "Why is the world's No. 1 computer company not willing to offer any type of indemnification for Linux? Why are they not saying so publicly? They're afraid that they could lose, and so if they lose that would be a very big payout." What does it say about Linux if the big companies who sell it aren't willing to warrant that it's legal?

Red Hat, despite repeated requests, was not available for comment on the SCO case. When asked about indemnification, Trink Guarino, a spokeswoman for IBM, said that because Linux is an open-source program, "no single company provides it, and users understand that there are no warranties or indemnities that come with it, and that no single company can indemnify it." Guarino also sent Salon an internal memo that IBM's executives recently sent to its sales team. The letter tells salespeople that they should inform customers that SCO's case is baseless and that they have nothing to fear from Linux. "Make no mistake, SCO will continue to look for ways to create fear, uncertainty and doubt -- FUD, not facts, remains the focus of SCO's efforts," Bob Samson, an IBM vice president, wrote. "As the lawsuit continues, understand that the industry will resolve it. In the meantime, if you get questions, as always, send them to this ID or contact your local counsel."

But if IBM truly believed that SCO's case was FUD, Laura DiDio wonders, why isn't it telling its customers that it will assume any legal risks they incur in using it? DiDio notes that this is a standard practice for proprietary operating system sales. "If Linux is going to take its place as an enterprise server and desktop operating system alongside Unix and Windows and Netware and Apple Macintosh, it has got to be certified ready and worthy not just from a technical standpoint but from a business standpoint," she says.

What DiDio does not note, though, is that indemnification, like any form of insurance, costs money. Part of the reason proprietary operating systems cost as much as they do is that the companies you purchase them from pay for this insurance and then they pass the cost on to customers. And for software released under the GPL, indemnification might cost more -- not because open-source software carries any measurably greater risk, but because, in a highly technical, actuarial sense, the risks associated with open-source software might just be harder to calculate, says Gordon Haff. If IBM and Red Hat refuse to indemnify their customers, they're not necessarily saying they believe their customers are at risk; "they're saying that there are unknowable things in the world -- including potential intellectual property issues -- and for them to stand up and offer a potentially open-ended indemnification would be fiscally irresponsible," he says. "I think executives and lawyers get very nervous about indemnification clauses."

That may be a reasonable explanation for why Linux comes without indemnification, but it is not one likely to satisfy folks who might be just a bit wary about using the free OS when, every day, SCO is calling it illegal. If you keep using Linux and then, contrary to all expectations, SCO wins big in court, could you find yourself owing SCO a great deal? How much will you be liable for if you simply ignore SCO?

"I'm confident you'll owe nothing," says Lawrence Rosen, the general counsel of the Open Source Initiative. Under several theories of law, even if SCO wins against IBM, it will not be able to recoup money from users of Linux, he says.

For one thing, Rosen says, if IBM pays SCO its damages, then SCO is, in a legal sense, no longer damaged -- and can't claim money from anybody else. "There's a principle in the law that says that you can't double dip for your damages," Rosen says. "Lets suppose that you get into a three-car pileup and you sue one driver and he pays you out in full. Are you entitled to sue the other car? No. That would be paying twice for your damages."

If SCO proves and wins its case, then you, as the buyer of Linux, will have essentially purchased stolen goods -- though you believed it to be legitimate. Can someone sue you for using a product that you believed was legal but that later turned out to be stolen? That's unlikely, Rosen says. "This is unlike the big debate that's going on in music," he says. "Remember, you're not an infringer just because you played a piece of copied music -- you're an infringer because you copied it or distributed it. With Linux, you're typically just using it, not selling it or copying it. If I'm just using it, how am I infringing?"

Rosen's position seems logical, and if you're using Linux, there appears to be little to fear. SCO can't get you just for running an operating system, even if it insists that it can, and even if IBM won't indemnify you against its lawsuits.

But there is still a risk for Linux, Rosen says: It's that, in the apparent uncertainty created by SCO and others, people just don't know whom to believe. "I think that's the real problem of the SCO lawsuit is that it raised all these concerns," he say. "A company or a product has to deal with fear -- fear exploited by its enemies, its competitors. This fear has to be explained away by the company. What we have to do is tell people, 'Look, software is written by human beings and human beings do things -- and we are undertaking a process to minimize risks.'"

The question for Linux is, can people overcome the fear?

Global IT firm predicts Linux will have 20% desktop market share by 2008

From NewsForge

One of the world's largest IT companies is declaring that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within 5 years.

Siemens Business Systems, the $6 billion global IT consulting and outsourcing company, has conducted extensive testing with real-world, non-technical workers and is declaring that Linux has matured as a desktop and will quickly vault to the #2 most-installed OS in the world.

Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in enterprise settings, believes that Linux will grow quickly as a desktop OS because it can deliver equal productivity at significantly lower costs than Windows in very large enterprise environments -- installations of 4,000 to 40,000 desktops.

McNutt says that when Siemens, with 33,000 employees in 44 countries, initially evaluated Linux as a productivity desktop, it saw little utility outside of technical departments. "We didn't see Linux on the desktop as a major market, but we were wrong."

However, McNutt, interviewed by phone from Frankfurt, says Siemens has been prodded to investigate the viability of Linux on the desktop by customers who are both impressed by the success of Linux servers and annoyed by Microsoft's pricing and licensing policies.

The stakes are high, says McNutt: even a single day of productivity lost to technology issues like version upgrades, multiplied by 10,000 or more workers, quickly shows up on enterprise customers' balance sheets, and that's very bad news for the CIO. So, while lower IT costs are "very important" to large customers, maintaining productivity is even more critical.

That's why testing was conducted with "secretaries and managers, not IT people." McNutt believes that the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade: one day to acquaint users with the desktop, and one day to introduce the OpenOffice suite.

McNutt went on to say that Ximian's suite -- consisting of a Gnome-based Linux desktop, Evolution mail and calendar app, a tweaked OpenOffice suite, and Red Carpet admin tools -- can be deployed in very large enterprises at lower cost and with no greater disruption than a Windows upgrade, and with significant savings going forward. McNutt says that Linux will save 20% to 30% in administration costs, 50% in hardware costs, and 80% in licensing fees.

Siemens has no "religious" attachment to a particular distro or desktop environment. Before settling on Ximian, Siemens evaluated plain vanilla Gnome and KDE as well. Siemens found KDE to be more "Windows-like" than Gnome, but that led to problems when non-technical users expected a more Windows-like experience. Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was "different enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be less like Windows, which led to fewer adoption problems.

McNutt also believes that there is kind of virtuous cycle developing, where firms like Siemens and Novell are working with Open Source-oriented companies like Ximian (recently acquired by Novell) to swat bugs and develop features which ultimately go back to the Open Source community. That large group then improves and further debugs the corporate contributions, leading to a code base that rapidly becomes more useful, refined, and stable in corporate environments.

McNutt says that Linux reduces administration costs in large installations of 1,000 desktops and up because it is more scriptable and well-documented than Windows. "With Windows, there's always some feature that you can only get to through the GUI," he says. He also cites the better documentation in Linux that allows administrators to solve oddball problems that can be very time-consuming on Windows, where parts of the proprietary OS are undocumented. McNutt feels that Linux is particularly strong in remote management, which is becoming more important as enterprise workers become more widely dispersed.

Linux saves money on hardware because it typically requires fewer resources to start with, and also because "feature bloat" from application upgrades don't tend to result in machines that run unacceptably slowly after two years service. "If you can keep a machine running at acceptable levels of performance for three years rather than two, you've just saved 50% on hardware costs," McNutt says.

McNutt says that while Linux will save 80% over Microsoft's licensing fees, many large customers, particularly large European government offices, are even more unhappy about being in a position where Microsoft can dictate terms to them. He noted reports that even the U.S. Department of Defense and the State of Washington, Microsoft's home ground, are looking at Linux as an alternative as well.

"These government installations are huge -- often 30,000 or 40,000 desktops" says McNutt. The Europeans are miffed that Microsoft's new licensing leaves them unable to afford both upgrades and support on their current budgets, and, in any case, would much rather use their IT spending to help encourage a local tech industry rather than support a U.S. monopoly.

McNutt noted that some German city governments have already begun to install Linux desktops, and that his firm is about to roll out 7,000 Linux desktops at a "very large financial institution." If that program succeeds, McNutt expects to convert the remaining 27,000 seats to Linux as well.

He also says that large numbers of enterprises that have already delayed or skipped Windows upgrades to save money during difficult economic times are coming to a point that they will have to upgrade to maintain productivity levels. These companies will be looking closely at the experiences of the first large enterprises to embrace Linux on the desktop.

Mel Gibson unleashes an unholy uproar over movie about Christ's life

From Detroit Free Press

If you believe Mel Gibson, he has been divinely inspired. While he will be credited with directing and cowriting "The Passion," he says that his upcoming film about the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus of Nazareth -- who Gibson believes is literally the son of God -- is actually the work of the Holy Spirit, expressed through him.

If this is true, the Holy Spirit looks to be one hell of a filmmaker, if you'll excuse the expression. At least that's the impression I took away from the official 1-minute, 45-second online trailer for "The Passion," made available by Gibson's Icon Productions, and the 4 1/2-minute preview that was shown last weekend to a Christian convention in Anaheim, Calif. (Both can found at www.themoviebox.net/trailers /moviebox_trailers /passion_tr_page.htm).

Gibson has also claimed that the book on which much of the film is based, written by the 19th-Century German nun and mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, actually fell from his bookshelf one day, all but begging him to read it. He also says that "The Passion" is not anti-Semitic in its depiction of why Jesus was crucified, but that "anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability."

Naturally, some have begged to differ, including Rabbi Eugene Korn, one of the first Jewish leaders allowed to see the film. He reported it raises troubling questions about "deicide," suggesting Jewish complicity in Jesus' death. That was enough to provoke a news release from the Anti-Defamation League suggesting the film "unambiguously portrays Jewish authorities and the Jewish as the ones responsible for the decision to crucify Jesus." If that's so, what's the Holy Spirit up to?

Whatever it is, Gibson has taken note of the adverse publicity. The marketing director for his production company said Wednesday that Gibson has edited the film to show more "sympathetic" Jewish characters, including some who speak out against the crucifixion, though he was careful to say that wasn't the Gospel's version of the story.

"We believe we have softened the story compared to the way the Gospel has told it," Icon Productions' spokesman Paul Lauer said.

This, of course, is the problem with movies about religion -- and, to some extent, religion in general: God has to rely on humans to make his point. That makes much of what is said in his name somewhat suspect, which is why I've always believed Monty Python's "Life of Brian" is one of the best films ever made about religion. "Blessed are the cheese-makers?" asks one fellow who fails to get a good seat at the Sermon on the Mount. "Did he say blessed are the cheese-makers?"

Gibson, it is obvious, has his biases. He belongs to a Catholic sect that rejects the Second Vatican Council, in which various long-held traditions and teachings were revised or done away with. One section of Vatican II specifically repudiates the belief that Jews should be held responsible for Jesus' murder. Moreover, Hutton Gibson, the director's father, is a conservative Catholic author who has been quoted as calling Vatican II a "Masonic plot backed by the Jews" and as denying that the Holocaust occurred.

Let me admit my own biases: I believe there should be more movies about religion and faith. The reason there are not is the same reason there are not more serious dramas about politics and race and sex: Hollywood is in the business of catering to mass audiences, not offending them.

When someone like Gibson or Martin Scorsese, whose "Last Temptation of Christ" created an uproar for its alleged anti-Christian sentiments, elects to make a movie about Jesus (or Abraham or Muhammad), he is openly inviting the sort of controversy "The Passion" is only beginning to incite. This is why these films are most often bankrolled by a religious organization or by someone like Gibson, who has $25 million -- his current asking price to star in a movie -- to lose.

Moreover, audiences usually shun religious-themed movies on the grounds they do not go to the movies to be preached at and told what to think. They have cable news for that.

Besides, Gibson is still saying he wants "The Passion," which was filmed in Aramaic, to be released without subtitles, which is the equivalent of telling everyone save movie critics, scholars and sign-wavers to stay home. (I'm betting he backslides on this one.) If he sticks by his guns, Gibson may be forced to distribute the movie himself, or through a small boutique distributor that may be all too happy to court and exploit the controversy.

In the meantime, the story of the Passion -- one of suffering and sacrifice and among the most moving and dramatic stories in all literature -- will be overshadowed by yet another holy war waged by soldiers with God on their side. I for one am glad that the French composer Theodore Dubois wrote the impossibly moving "The Seven Last Words of Christ" before the age of mass media. Divinely inspired or not, the seven last words might have ended up as four or five.

Stupid Headlines

This amazing headline just in from Fox News...

South Koreans Split Over Alliance With United States
2,000 demand an end to alliance while 500 march to support the partnership

*Muddy's note*
I think there are waaaaaayyyyyy more people in SK than 2,500. :-/

Is Change Good?

Well, I made some changes toying with the look of the site tonight.
Just wondered what everyone thought.

Thanks,
Muddy

"Lake Erie Loop" Eyed in Power Outage

From FOXNews.com

Aug. 14: The darkened New York City skyline contrasts with a twilight sky.

WASHINGTON — Investigators focused on an electrical transmission loop Friday that encircles Lake Erie as they tried to understand a massive power blackout that cut across the Northeast and Midwest, leaving millions of people without electricity. The White House announced a U.S.-Canadian task force will investigate the cause of the blackout and identify actions to prevent it from happening again. It will be headed by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Canadian Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal.

President Bush said the power breakdown showed "we need to modernize the electricity grid." But, he acknowledged, "Something like this isn't going to happen overnight."

The cause of the blackout, which continued for a second day in many parts of the region, remained elusive as officials first suggested it had been triggered by a malfunction in Ohio and then backed off that assessment as premature. Earlier it had been believed the problem started in Canada, while still another theory had the cause pinned down to eastern Michigan.

No one was sure.

What did become clear, however, was that power grid experts were stunned at the broad reach of the blackout and the speed — a matter of seconds — in which it spread thousands of miles across New York and southern New England to the eastern sections of Michigan and into Canada.

"We never anticipated we could have a cascading outage" of this magnitude and speed, said Michehl Gent, chief of the North American Electric Reliability Council (search), the industry-sponsored organization charged with assessing the dependability of the nation's electric grids.

Precautions were supposed to have been put in place to prevent such a widespread domino effect, he said, vowing to ferret out what triggered the chain of events and to take corrective action.

If the problem began in Ohio or Michigan, as was being speculated, it should never have reached Manhattan, complained New York Gov. George Pataki (search), adding that the grid was supposed to be designed to isolate such problems. "That just did not happen," he said.

But it may be days, even weeks, before solid answers emerge.

As power slowly began to be restored Friday, officials jumped from one theory to another in search for a cause.

Gent at a news conference acknowledged that the answer was somewhere on what is called the "Lake Erie Loop (search)" — a massive, but troublesome transmission loop that encircles Lake Erie from New York to Detroit, into Canada and back to New York.

"That's the center of the focus. This has been problem for years and there have been all sorts of plans to make it more reliable," said Gent.

About the time power was disrupted at 4:11 p.m. EDT Thursday, technicians noticed a stunning development on the northern leg of the loop: some 300 megawatts of electricity moving east abruptly reversed course and within seconds 500 megawatts of power suddenly were moving west.

Electricity flows on its easiest path so it is believed the change in direction was caused by a sudden reduction in power somewhere on the line at the western end of the loop, investigators suggested.

"This was a big swing back and forth," said Gent, adding that throughout the grid system, power levels began to fluctuate. That caused generators and other systems to trip across the region to protect equipment.

More than 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear reactors in the United States and in Canada, shut down, most of them automatically to protect themselves against power surges, officials said.

The whole process "essentially took 9 seconds," said Gent "It happened very quickly."

But what triggered the shift of electricity flow and where?

As of late Friday no one was confident enough to say.

"Speculation is running rampant," said Gent. "I really don't want to speculate."

He said it could be next week before any firm answers are known, but he ticked off a string of factors that authorities are certain played no role.

Reports of lightning hitting a facility in the Niagara Falls (search) area have been ruled out, as have reports that a fire at a New York City electric facility may have triggered the power disaster.

The weather also has been given a reprieve because it was not hot enough either in the Ohio Valley or in the Northeast to cause such a demand on electricity that the system should have overloaded, said Gent. In fact, he said, there was plenty of extra capacity.

And terrorism has been ruled out by everyone from grid managers to President Bush.

But Gent said he wouldn't rule out that negligence by someone, somewhere might have been a cause. Investigators will have to determine whether some industry transmission standards might have been ignored, or perhaps simply conclude that the industry-crafted standards are inadequate.

The political fallout from this week's blackout will be heard long after power is restored. And much of the discussion will center around the need to modernize and, possibly expand, the nation's aging electrical transmission system.

Congressional committees already are staking out time for hearings on the blackout when lawmakers return from their summer recess after Labor Day. Federal and a number of state regulatory agencies also plan to pursue investigations.

Pat Wood, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (search), cautioned not to jump to conclusions until "we see what really happened here." But he said a critical question is to determine why protective safeguards did not isolate the grid failure wherever it occurred.

Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., said his House Energy and Commerce Committee plans hearings next month on the causes behind the blackout. He said he anticipated the blackout will spur lawmakers to take a closer look at how to improve the power systems when they work out a final energy bill.

Nora Brownell, another FERC commissioner, said the industry's move toward competition should not be blamed, as some critics of electricity market deregulation have argued.

"It's very clear this is not about deregulation. It's about investing in the transmission system," said Brownell.

RIAA Methods Under Scrutiny

From Wired News

WASHINGTON -- A Senate panel will hold hearings on the recording industry's crackdown against online music swappers, the chairman said Thursday.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota), made the announcement in a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America. He had received information he had requested from the group about the campaign, which Coleman has called excessive.

The Senate governmental affairs' permanent subcommittee on investigations is reviewing the group's responses and declined to make them available Thursday. The RIAA was also silent.

The association announced plans in June to file several hundred lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing songs on the Internet. Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song.

In his letter, Coleman said he would look at not just the scope of that campaign but also the dangers that downloaders face by making their personal information available to others. Coleman said he would review legislation that would expand criminal penalties for downloading music.

An RIAA statement said that "hearings are part of any oversight process and we always look forward to having the opportunity to present our position."

Coleman said he is concerned the campaign could ensnare innocent people, such as parents and grandparents whose computers are being used to download music by their children and grandchildren. He also said that some downloaders themselves might not know they are breaking the law.

Coleman has admitted that he used to download music from Napster, the file-sharing service that a federal judge shut down for violating music copyrights.

He wrote that as subcommittee chairman, he intends "to assist in the development of remedies that will be reasonable and narrowly tailored to fit the extent of infringement."

Coleman was on vacation Thursday and unavailable for comment.

Last month, Coleman asked the RIAA to furnish him with a list of its subpoenas, its safeguards against invading privacy and making erroneous subpoenas, its standards for issuing subpoenas and a description of how it collects evidence of illegal file sharing.

Man Killed By Racing Cars

From TheWBALChannel.com

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- A man from Riverdale was killed when he was struck Sunday morning by a car that was allegedly racing another car.

Police Seek Racing Vehicles

Anne Arundel County police said Chelliah Johnson, 53, was hit as he was attempting to cross Laurel Fort Meade Road just before 9 a.m. Sunday. An unknown type of car -- possibly an Acura Integra -- hit Johnson as two vehicles were seen racing east on Laurel Fort Meade Road.

Investigators said as a result of the impact, Johnson was thrown more than 225 feet down the roadway while severing both legs and an arm. Both vehicles fled the scene without stopping.

Based on the evidence at the collision scene, police said the striking vehicle probably sustained at least a broken tinted headlight cover, a broken headlight, damage to the front of the vehicle and possibly a broken windshield. Due to the injuries and the distance the victim was thrown, investigators said the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed when the collision occurred.

ISP group challenges RIAA subpoenas

From CNET News.com

An Internet company trade association sent a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America, asking for information and dialogue over issues related to the subpoenas being issued for file-swappers' identities.

NetCoalition, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group that represents companies ranging from small Internet service providers to Yahoo and DoubleClick, on Monday said it is worried that ISPs are getting drawn too deeply into the RIAA's online enforcement efforts--an issue that has kept relations between copyright holders and Net service providers tense for years.

"There are understandable fears among many in the Internet community that the real purpose of this legal campaign is to achieve in court what the association has not yet been able to accomplish in Congress--to make Internet companies legally responsible for the conduct of individuals who use their systems," the group wrote in its letter. "Obviously, such a result would be an anathema to Internet companies and the millions of Americans who use this medium on a daily basis to engage in countless legitimate activities impossible in the offline world."

The letter comes after a month during which the RIAA's unprecedented campaign to track down the identities of alleged file-swappers has dominated headlines. In preparation for what could ultimately be thousands of copyright-infringement lawsuits against individual computer users, the record industry trade group has already sent close to 1,000 subpoenas seeking subscribers' identities to ISPs and colleges.

A few recipients have already fought back. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College challenged the RIAA subpoenas, saying they were not filed correctly. A Massachusetts federal judge agreed last week, saying that the RIAA had not followed proper legal procedures.

California service provider Pacific Bell Internet Services, a division of giant SBC Communications, has filed a more substantive challenge to the subpoenas, including charges that the requests for information are unconstitutional.

NetCoalition is taking a somewhat more conciliatory approach--at least for now. On behalf of its members, which at least indirectly include America Online and EarthLink, it has asked for information on 18 different issues related to the subpoenas and is calling for a meeting with the RIAA to allay its members' fears.

NetCoalition's questions included the following:

• How does the RIAA identify potential infringers?

• How does the RIAA ensure that songs being offered on file-swapping networks are indeed copyrighted?

• Has the RIAA been able to obtain the needed personal information on an ISP subscriber without a subpoena?

• How will the RIAA decide to file a lawsuit based on the information gleaned from the subpoena?

• Does the RIAA believe that ISPs need to configure wireless access points--currently viewed as one way to surf and download relatively anonymously--so that they can always identify computer users?

• Will the RIAA compensate ISPs for costs resulting from the subpoenas?

The final point is a crucial one for many ISPs. The stream of subpoenas is proving expensive for some providers, and the providers should not be forced to bear that financial burden, the companies say.

"Smaller ISPs, whose limited resources are already being exhausted by legitimate law enforcement requests, simply cannot afford to underwrite legal fishing expeditions and still provide services for their subscribers," the NetCoalition letter said.

An RIAA representative said that the group would be happy to talk to ISPs.

"We welcome the opportunity to sit down with anyone in the ISP community to discuss Internet piracy and how we can work together constructively," the representative said. "We look forward to dispelling some of the gross inaccuracies contained in the letter and hope that these ISPs will help to foster the legitimate online music marketplace."

Executives from the record group have said they are still on track to file the first round of lawsuits resulting from the subpoena information in late August or early September.