We’ve bagged our limit. Photos to follow. A travel day tomorrow, and things should be back to normal by Friday.
Next year, I’m inviting Kathy Shaidle. It’s so much funner when they let you kill stuff.

“… what is the nature of your emergency?”
(More.)

Police say cause of death awaits autopsy results, but stupidity has not been ruled out.

Via Slashdot;

About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman.”

Via G&M;

CBC Television abruptly cancelled a featured documentary just hours before it was to air on Tuesday night, prompting complaints that the network bowed to pressure from American government officials.
“I was actually contacted myself by a gentleman who is a cultural consultant with the Bush Whitehouse,” Mr. Keay said. “He was very polite.” CBC will run a new version of the documentary “sooner rather than later,” the spokesman added, but couldn’t say precisely when.
[…]
The American director says he has no intention of re-editing a piece that he spent three years working on. “We have to quote-unquote give balance,” veteran filmmaker Michael Moore said in an interview.

More here and here.

Calling Captain Understatement…

British marine biologists have found what may be the oldest living animal — that is, until they killed it.
[…]
Only after researchers cut through its shell, which made it more of an ex-clam, and counted its growth rings did they realize how old it had been — between 405 and 410 years old.
Another clam of the same species had been verified at 220 years old, and a third may have lived 374 years. But this most recent clam was the oldest yet.
“Its death is an unfortunate aspect of this work, but we hope to derive lots of information from it,” postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker told London’s Guardian newspaper. “For our work, it’s a bonus, but it wasn’t good for this particular animal.”

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine.
Of course, I got to kill stuff right away. Maybe that makes a difference.

Never learn….

Redesdale sat with Parker, who was dressed in the exterminator outfit he wears: toxic-green sweater and pants. With them was a local groundskeeper. They were looking at maps of Northumberland, seeing how the war was going. Redesdale explained the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership to the groundskeeper. “So you on board for being part of the killing team?” he asked the man.
“Aye.”
“Brilliant.”

Bumped, with updates.
How’s that working for you?

“This could serve as a vehicle for dialogue between the U.S. and Iran,” said Faiza Ali, speaking for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Indeed!

Chancellors of six Iranian universities and academic centers on Tuesday expressed indignation at aggressive tone and degrading behavior of head of Columbia University Lee Bollinger in hosting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
They forwarded a protest letter to Bollinger to voice outrage at his ignorance of the principle of hosting the president of Iran, a country of great civilization and a 7,000-year history.
“It is a shame for an academic center that such hateful and impolite words are uttered by its president. It is regretful that the media owners easily elicit what they want the president of a reputable university to say in his lecture,” they said in the letter.
“Your statement about Iran was full of undocumented charges brought by the media and some of which were the outcome of misunderstanding which needs dialogue and closer study,” it said.

Just like the holocaust!
Properly chastized, Ahmadinejad declares that “the nuclear issue of Iran is now closed,” asserting that his government would disregard calls by “arrogant powers” to end its uranium enrichment.” .. while… “The Columbia speech brought him derision in many Western circles, but it apparently delighted audiences back in his country, who have come to depend on the Iranian leader to deliver his fiery anti-American sentiments.”
Update – It’s Ahmadinejad Week at Cox & Forkum!

The American Left responds: Ahmadinejad ‘sounds entirely too reasonable’

A village has uploaded its idiot.

From your bank?

So, why is any of this of interest, especially in a column devoted to tech and society? Because, one little item in the middle of this story caught my attention. It was a quote by a Northern Rock depositor who, seeing the long line in front of his local branch, decided to be clever and go online to withdraw his funds. The response: The server was currently busy.
That wasn’t surprising. So he tried again. And again. And again. The same reply every time. Forty-eight hours later, he was still getting a “server busy” reply. Needless to say, he had long since come to the conclusion that the system wasn’t overloaded at all, but that Northern Rock had simply locked down the system.
For 20 years now, we’ve all been worried about cybercrime, identity theft and the loss of privacy in regards to banking on the Internet. Some people are so fearful of the Wild West Web that they simply refuse to bank there.
But what never crossed my mind, and I suspect not yours either, is that the banks themselves might pose a threat — that they might, willy-nilly, choose to lock their virtual doors in the same way that they historically have shuttered their real ones.

According to the Globe & Mail, the noble savagelets defending themselves from an unconscious man did so while police stood by and did nothing;

Joe Gualtieri said that his brother survived only because the gang of youths who were hitting his unconscious brother’s head with a piece of wood – possibly an oak rail from the house – ran away when one of Sam’s sons shouted: “He’s dead, he’s dead.”
Mr. Gualtieri was attacked after a Thursday protest stopped construction at the Stirling South building development in Caledonia, southwest of Hamilton. The 90-unit subdivision, on eight hectares, is about one kilometre from the disputed Douglas Creek development, which has been occupied by protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve since February, 2006.
In an interview shortly after Sam Gualtieri underwent an MRI in a Hamilton hospital yesterday, his brother said Mr. Gualtieri was attacked when he went back to see what was happening at the house.
Joe Gualtieri said Ontario Provincial Police officers on the site “stood there, and they did not intervene” until after the beating, when the attackers had fled.
[…]
The confederacy has adopted a policy of seeking development agreements with those building on the Haldimand Tract, a strip of land 9½ kilometres either side of the Grand River, and its lawyer Aaron Detlor has been in Caledonia negotiating with Mr. Kragten.
Haldimand Mayor Marie Traynor described the proposed development fee as “like the old-time Mafia, isn’t it? That’s what people have been telling me. That’s how they see it, and I have to agree. If you give me some money, I’ll leave you alone.”

Previous.

Watch as the Globe and Mail smears these pigs with lipstick ;

Native occupation about to end peacefully when confrontation occurred between contractor and several young men, police say

In the real world we call this a home invasion.

The occupation was about to end peacefully around 4 p.m. when the subdeveloper entered the house and clashed with several aboriginal youths.
Sam Gualtieri, 52, of Caledonia, was found unconscious on the floor inside the home with at least four young men, his brother Joe, told The Globe and Mail. His brother was trying to chase them out of the house when they punched him, his nephews later told him.
“The Indian was striking him on the head with a two-by-four while he was unconscious.”
Mr. Gualtieri was rushed to West Haldimand General Hospital with serious injuries.
“He’s in and out of consciousness. He has a concussion, a broken nose, he’s bruised all over the face. His teeth are broken. He might have fluid in his spine as well,” Joe Gualtieri said.
OPP Constable Paula Wright confirmed there was a confrontation between a 52-year-old contractor and a “number of unknown young males” shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday near the building site where protesters from the Six Nations reserve were gathered.

Guess who gave them the green light?

While the province purchased the Douglas Creek site from the developer, builders who now become the target of protest should not look to the province for help, according to industry sources who attended a recent private briefing by John Burke, the deputy minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing.
Industry sources said that, last Friday, the final business day before the writ calling the provincial election came down, Mr. Burke said the province stands behind its land registry system and development approval process.
But he cautioned that native protests turn a construction site into police business, and even if the builder gets a court injunction ordering protesters off the site, the police will be cautious in enforcing it because their priority is avoiding conflict, the sources added.
“The message to individual developers was: Pray to God that your land doesn’t get occupied,” said one developer who heard Mr. Burke.

The Toronto Star relates a somewhat different (though equally sanitized) sequence of events;

Natives said the youths saw the builder enter the home and went to investigate. When they were attacked, they defended themselves.

As I said, where I come from, they call this a home invasion.
With the writ dropped, no better opportunity exists for the beseiged residents of Caledonia to turn this issue into Dalton McGuinty’s worst election nightmare. You have 25 days, people – make them count.
(If you can stomach the wretched site design, there’s lots more at CWC, including a link to a site that has recorded radio transmissions of OPP & DCE security.)
UPDATE – According to the Globe & Mail, the noble savagelets defending themselves from an unconscious man did so while police stood by and did nothing.

Much is being made of the “jailhouse testimony” by a man who now states Saskatoon police officers Bradley Senger and Lawrence Hartwig were not responsible for the freezing death of Neil Stonechild…

The notorious freezing death of Neil Stonechild 17 years ago was a murder calculated to keep him from testifying at a trial, and had nothing to do with police, a police commission hearing was told Wednesday.
A career criminal told the Saskatoon hearing that a gun deal gone bad led to 17-year-old Stonechild’s murder by a man against whom he was scheduled to testify.

… by the same people in local media who neglect to mention the nature of the testimony by the lone “eye witness” who put Stonechild in the officer’s car 4 days before his disappearance – career criminal Jason Roy;

He didn’t come forward with his story about the cry for help until after receiving visualization therapy at Kilborn detention center for juvenile offenders.

Nor is it usually mentioned that the judge who oversaw the inquiry discounted the testimony of two accredited forensic pathologists in favour of Roy’s reconstructed memory.

Calgary Sun;

The paper copy of a power-point presentation assembled for incoming Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn specifically addresses whether Canada’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels during the next four years and when Canada can pull out of the accord.
One page raises the question, “Whether/when to acknowledge Canada will be very unlikely to meet target?”
It goes on to state the government “Cannot formally ‘de-ratify’ (Kyoto) until 2009.”
The document, dated Feb. 3, 2006, was only days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet was sworn in after the Conservatives’ election victory. Less than two months earlier, the former Liberal environment minister Stephane Dion hosted a conference on climate change.

h/t

Mr Bloke: A liver donor’s card.
First Man: Need we say more?
Second Man: No!
Mr Bloke: Look, I can’t give it to you now. It says ‘In The Event of Death’…
First Man: No-one who has ever had their liver taken out by us has survived…
*

You will wear that name to your grave.

… as long as students don’t chase each other.
Back in my day we chased each other and we yelled “BANG!”.
Sometimes we even carried scissors.