Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[genocide roach]

that and shanghai disney in a few years
~gR~

 

[BlackMetalWhiteGuy]

Sweet, I can't wait to get a hand job from a Disney character

EDIT:

 

[Cythraul]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/07/AR2009050702001.html?hpid=topnews

Congressional democrats can't deal with a $17 billion cut from a $3.4 trillion budget. Because if we're going to spend like drunken sailors, we sure as hell better really spend like drunken sailors. Mind you, the proposed cut is chump change relatively speaking and very likely just a way to throw a bone to fiscal conservatives.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Jesus Christ. If they can't even manage to cut 0.5% worth of obviously wasteful spending off the budget, we are completely fucked. Hopefully that's just a minority of opposition they're talking about.

 

[Dak]

We have to spend to fix our debt problem ldo.

 

[Orion Crystal Ice]

Everybody should always keep this in mind.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1

DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.

"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.

He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.

"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."

Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w

Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh

Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia


^ Emboldened quote is something everyone who knows how to read and think needs to always remember. IMO.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

Haha, that rules.

 

[Mort Divine]

We have to spend to fix our debt problem ldo.

Investing fixes debt problems, not spending.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Man, that's pathetic. After all the times teachers berate kids about using Wikipedia in school reports, it's the "professionals" who end up doing it.

I hope some people are canned like hell over that.

 

[Dak]

Investing fixes debt problems, not spending.

Not if it is bad investments though. Production fixes debt problems.

 

[King Richard]

Intel is being fined $1.45 BILLION by the European Union.

That's an insane fine, but their actions did seem a bit shady. Bad Intel bad!

 

[BlackMetalWhiteGuy]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Irish-student-hoaxes-worlds-apf-15201451.html?.v=1

Someone from the TabIt forums added a "Noogies for Liberals" greatest hits album to Toby Keith's wikipedia article a couple months ago and it's still there. After forgetting about it for over a month, he ran a google search for the fake album and discovered that there are now over 20 music sites listing it as part of the Toby Keith discography. The TabIt community was so entertaining by this that they assembled a compilation of various members' original music and you can now find torrents for the "album" all over the web

 

[The Ozzman]

Intel is being fined $1.45 BILLION by the European Union.

That's an insane fine, but their actions did seem a bit shady. Bad Intel bad!

You beat me to it. I was going to put 'Intel fined 1.45 billion by the EU; AMD will still have shitty market share'.

There is one section of that article I find to be shady (like giving rebates to certain companies). Other than that I still think it's just AMD bitching because they can't compete.

EDIT: Intel's market share is somewhere around 80% btw

 

[genocide roach]

maybe i missed it, but how long did it take for someone to remove the incorrect info on wikipedia
~gR~

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Looks like the glorious return of dictatorship in Russia is on the horizon.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ls-return-as-president-with-court-reform.html

Vladimir Putin signals return as president with court reform
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 5:21PM BST 13 May 2009

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has been accused of plotting his return as president after the Kremlin announced plans to strip judges of the right to elect the head of the country's powerful constitutional court.

The loss of the judiciary's last quasi-independent position would remove any lingering potential for a legal challenge should Mr Putin make an early presidential comeback.

After serving consecutive four-year terms, Mr Putin was obliged to step down as president last year. He became prime minister instead and shoehorned his long-term protege, Dmitry Medvedev, into his old job.

Although he is legally allowed to run as president once again during elections in 2012, Mr Putin reignited speculation of an earlier return over the weekend after he appeared to call Mr Medvedev's future into question.

According to Nikolai Petrov, a political scientist at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, Mr Putin may be worried that a comeback before 2012 could face legal obstacles. The constitution is unclear on the subject.

"There are rumours that the decision on the constitutional court is to allow Mr Putin to come back," said Mr Petrov said. "If he were to return in 2012 it would not be necessary.

"But if there are early elections it would be necessary to ensure that Medvedev's departure is not challenged."

The proposal, which critics said would effectively rid Russia of its last democratic vestiges, was put forward by Mr Medvedev, perhaps in an attempt to appease his mentor after speculation that the president was starting to assert his independence.

Russian MPs are expected to approve the plan in coming weeks. The parliamentary speaker, Boris Gryzlov, said it would "highlight the strength of Russian parliamentarianism".

The new rules would see the head of the court, which has the ability to overturn legislation it regards as unconstitutional, appointed by the pliant upper house of parliament, essentially making his position dependent on the Kremlin's whim.

At present, the court's president is chosen by its 19 constituent judges through a secret ballot.

Practically, the decision is likely to make little difference beyond making an unlikely challenge to Mr Putin's ambitions impossible. The constitutional court has not challenged a Kremlin-backed law since at least 2004, while its president, Valery Sorkin, last month called on the government to "employ authoritarian methods" to prevent Russia from slipping into anarchy because of the financial crisis.

Even so, Kremlin critics said the move completed Mr Putin's ambitions to exert total control over the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the television media, under a so-called "power vertical".

"The vertical has almost been completed," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, an outspoken dissident of the Soviet era. "Only the lawyers are not appointed, but that will be the next step."

Observers also said the proposed legislation was evidence that Mr Medvedev, who came to power pledging to battle "legal nihilism", was not as liberal as he often made out.

"This is a very good example of judging Medvedev's words against his deeds," said Mr Petrov. "There is a very big difference between his diagnosis and what he prescribes."

Mr Medvedev won plaudits after giving an interview to a prominent opposition newspaper and for meeting human rights activists who Mr Putin once derided as "jackals".

But critics say that any liberalisation has been cosmetic because Mr Putin remains Russia's most powerful man and only allows his successor to put on a liberal front for the sake of appearances. Mr Putin is alleged to have told Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, that he was "the bad cop", while Mr Medvedev was "the good cop".

Evidence of how little things have changed, the critics maintain, came during an important mayoral election last month in Sochi, the city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Although, in a small concession, a liberal candidate was allowed to run, he was prevented from campaigning and repeatedly rubbished on local television while the vote itself was marred by rigging allegations.

 

[The Ozzman]

Russia FUCK YEAH

 

[Dak]

Like he ever actually "left power" to begin with.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Well yeah, that's kinda the point.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

More cheerful news on public freedoms from the UK:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133423.html

Disturbing the Peace
On the inalienable right to "excessively noisy sex"
Brendan O'Neill | May 11, 2009

"Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship."

So wrote George Orwell in 1984, his dystopian vision of a future world where mankind's every thought, desire, and bodily tingle would be policed by the powers-that-be. Orwell imagined a Junior Anti-Sex League that spied on kissing and cavorting adults, and a ruling Party that sought to squash the "sex impulse." The heroes of his nightmarish tale—Winston and Julia—had to sneak off to a wood in order to explore each other bodies in a bit of peace and quiet.

It turns out that Orwell was suffering from premature speculation. It was not in 1984 that a major Western government made the "sex impulse"—the grunting, groaning sex instinct—into a police matter; it was in 2009. Here in the U.K., to add to our already-existing panoply of Orwellian measures—5 million CCTV cameras that watch our every move; "speaking cameras" that warn us to pick up litter or stop loitering; the government's attempt to recruit child spies to re-educate anti-social adults—we now have the bizarre and terrifying situation where a woman has been arrested for having sex too loudly.

Yes, in modern-day Britain even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home." Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: "I can't stop making noise during sex. It's unnatural to not make any noises and I don't think that I am particularly loud."

Pleasurable groaning and bed-banging are common noises in crowded towns and cities across the civilized world. Most of us deal with them by sticking a CD in the stereo. Those who complain are normally told to stop being prudish or to have a discreet chat with the creators of the offending sex sounds. So how did Cartwright's expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?

Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people's behaviour—that forbade her from making "excessive noise during sex" anywhere in England.

That's right, going even further than Orwell's imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright's noisy shenanigans. If she wanted to howl with abandon, she would have to nip over the border to Scotland or maybe catch a ferry to France. It was because she breached the conditions of her Anti-Social Behaviour Order, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.

This case sheds harsh light not only on the Victorian-style petty prudishness of our rulers, who seriously believe they can make sexually expressive women timid again by dragging them to court, but on the tyranny of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders themselves. Introduced by our authoritarian Labour government in 1998, anyone can apply for an ASBO to stop anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, "alarming," or "threatening."

Local magistrates' courts issue the orders, sometimes on the basis of hearsay evidence (which is permissible in "ASBO cases"). In short, the applicant for an ASBO does not have to go through the normal rigors of the criminal justice system in order to get a civil ruling preventing someone he doesn't like from doing something that he finds "alarming" or "dangerous." Once you have been branded with an ASBO, if you break its conditions—by having noisy sex in your own home, for example—you are potentially guilty of a crime and can be imprisoned.

The ASBO system has turned much of Britain into a curtain-twitching, neighbor-watching, noise-policing gang of spies. The relative ease with which one can apply to the authorities for an ASBO positively invites people to use the system to punish their foes or the irritants who live in their neighborhoods. ASBOs have been used to prevent young people in certain areas from wearing hoods or hats (they look "threatening"), to ban a middle-aged couple from playing gangsta rap (the expletives offended workers and children at a nearby kindergarten), and to prevent a 10-year-old boy from having contact with matches until he turns 16, after he was found to have started a fire.

And now, prudish people who previously would have been told to "put up or shut up" over their neighbors' noisy sex have been empowered to turn one woman's private affairs into a very public trial. This, too, is Orwellian: the creation of new layers of spies and inter-communal suspicion.

In Orwell's dystopia, "the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion." So it is in Wearside in 2009, where the excessively noisy exploits of Cartwright and her possibly very talented partner are a form of rebellion against the arbitrary and interventionist nature of the ASBO-wielding powers-that-be. They are screwing for liberty.

So all you Brits, you might want to start tying gags over your mouths to keep all those involuntary noises from your natural human behavior from landing you in prison. Cheers.

 

[The Ozzman]

Proof that England sucks