On The Third Hand

Via the BBC:

Campaigns to persuade people to stop downloading pirated games or software from the internet are not working, a report suggests.

Two UK university researchers found that people did not see downloading copyrighted material as theft.

The findings are unwelcome news for the games industry, which says it loses more than £2bn annually from piracy.

No! Really!

Who’d a thunk it.

Those in the movie/gaming/music/software industries cry whine and wring their collective hands over lost revenue through piracy. I have zero sympathy for them and here’s why.

Pirated DVD’s here in the Philippines have reached the same level of quality as the originals. Sound is 6 channel, video is excellent, the only thing missing in some, but not all cases, are the extra features. And the frosting on this theft cake are availability. The Disney “Herbie” flic released this week in the States was available on the streets of Manila early this week. The same can be said for many of the recent Hollywood releases, Robot, Shrek 2 and Madagascar all appeared at or just before the US release date.

The only explaination for that are industry insiders are cashing in by leaking the masters, or first generation copies, and Fedexing them to “partners in piracy” in Asia or elsewhere. That also explains why the extra features are missing, those are added when the DVD’s are produced six months or so after the movie is released

So until they clean their own house I shed no tears!

Cross posted within the Cranial Cavity

Man With Bloody Chain Saw Let in to U.S.

James gets my quote of the week for the following:

One doesn’t have to be Quincy, M.E. to spot blood on a chain saw, especially when the guy is also carrying a sword, a hatchet, a knife, and brass knuckles. And looks like the guy in the photo.

Click the link to see the photo. And if you’ve been following the various MSM obsessions lately, do his eyes remind you of anyone? (Just wondering.)

Columbus, Ohio

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick admitted to an Ohio Highway Patrol sergeant that she had indeed had something to drink before she was pulled over Monday afternoon for driving under the influence.

Indeed she did. Despite the qualifing and all too dismissive “something,” - she blew a 0.216 - more than twice the legal limit for driving while intoxicated.

“I’m hoping you show up 000,” Sergeant Stidham said as he prepared to give her the portable test, the results of which are not admissible in court.

“I won’t,” she said. “I won’t. I won’t. I did have something to drink. I don’t know if I had. . . .”

Sergeant Stidham: “How long ago was that, do you think?”
Justice Resnick: “I don’t know.”
Sergeant Stidham: “I mean, a couple of hours?”
Justice Resnick: “I’m just really upset.”

Later, after seeing the results, she said, “Well, I don’t believe that.”

Sergeant. Stidham: “You’re showing a 0.216.”
Justice Resnick: “My God.”
Sergeant Stidham: “That’s well over double what you’re allowed to have.”
Justice Resnick: “I can’t believe that. I don’t believe that test. Do you have another test that I can take?”

“Well yes there is” - the officer should have said - “it’s the one you take just after the female drunk tank in-proccessing officer says, ‘lift your robes and smile.’”

“I am tired,” she first told the sergeant. “I have a mother-in-law who’s 97 and has been in the hospital. I was taking care of her. I have a husband who is on dialysis, and I have got to get to Columbus. I have not been drinking, I will be very careful if you just let me go.”

You can almost sympathize with this poor woman, almost. But then she pulls the ultimate “it’s true, it’s true” moment by blaming the entire episode on some type of EVIIIL Karl Rovian plot: “I’m the only Democrat on the court, and you’re forcing me to retire.”

Yes, just like they forced you to suck down “something” til you were incoherently stupid.

H/T “Briney.”

Cross posted within the “Cavity.”

Graner sentenced to 10 years for abuses.

He will also be given a dishonorable discharge from the Reserve at the rank of private.

Friday, the same jury found Graner guilty of 10 charges, including aggravated assault, maltreatment and conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused Graner of being a ringleader in the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners that came to light when photos of apaprent abuses were broadcast in the media in April 2004.

Now, if only prison guards in domestic prisons were getting the same treatment, we might get somewhere. (FYI, the prisoners involved in those pictures were common criminals, not jihadis — at least not then.)

Totally off-topic to CNN: Would you like a good proofreader? I know at least two I could recommend. “Apaprent” isn’t a word.

Crude Awakening for U.N. Slicksters

Iraqi officials have recently implicated more U.N. staffers in bribe taking during the oil-for-food program in a development that could dramatically escalate pressure on the world body, The Post has learned.

Investigators from the House International Relations Committee said several current and former officials in Iraq’s Oil, Health and Transportation ministries have told them that U.N. staffers assigned to the “661 Committee” — the U.N. Security Council group that oversaw sanctions and approved oil-for-food contracts — regularly took bribes and kickbacks from suppliers of aid to Iraq during the program.

The Iraqi ministry officials said the U.N. staffers, based in New York, were paid to accelerate approval of oil-for-food contracts or provide secret information on why certain suspicious contracts with Saddam Hussein’s regime were blocked by the 661 Committee, investigators said.

News that more U.N. officials may be involved in corruption is the latest revelation to rock the United Nations, where Secretary-General Kofi Annan is fending off calls for his resignation in the aftermath of history’s biggest financial scandal in which Saddam is alleged to have ripped off $21.3 billion.

Anyone surprised?

These guys sell a referrer spamming program.

Reffy is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer tool, which means that it will make a connection to a list of URLs with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics. Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries.

Reffy is extremely fast in operation because instead of actually downloading entire websites, it sends a customized HTTP header for which it receives a small response. On a modern computer with any kind of broadband, the average number of websites hit per second usually stabilize around 60 to 100.

Reffy has plenty of options and features, among other things an URL harvester which eases your job of collecting URLs to referral market to. The URL harvester just needs you to give it one or more URLs from which it can extract out URLs to the main list. Reffy also sports rotating User-Agents, proxies, and even referrers.

Reffy comes with a pre-generated list of 3047 active blog websites, and a good User-Agent list of real User-Agents taken from real statistics is also included.

This, ladies and gents, is a good reason NOT to run those referrer scripts. I wonder if we can all send them bills for the advertising on our sites?

And yes, I’m linking them. Maybe we can give them a nice instalanche or slashdotting or somesuch. Would serve the %&*(&#@#s right.

[update] Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam for wider exposure.

Chirac’s off the tab

An investigation into French President Jacques Chirac’s 2.2 million euro ($3.7 million) food bill while he was was mayor of Paris has been dropped after the current mayor admitted he had exhausted all legal options in the case.

A Paris appeals court last week dismissed the case against Mr Chirac and his wife Bernadette over the tab they ran up between 1987 and 1995, saying time had run out under the statute of limitations.

Emphais mine.

U.N. Obstructs Justice by William Safire

“I’m angry that we find the U.N. proactively interfering with our investigation,” Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, informed Lou Dobbs on CNN, “by telling certain folks not to cooperate with us.” He repeated for emphasis his sharp response to Secretary General Kofi Annan’s “interfering with our ability to get information we need” about the oil-for-food scandal.

Judith Miller of The Times had revealed that the Minnesota Republican, joined by ranking Democrat Carl Levin, sent a letter noting Annan’s four-month foot-dragging and that “the U.N. is hindering our efforts to obtain relevant documents.”

If legislative investigators were prosecutors, the name of the game Annan and his enablers are playing would be called “obstruction of justice.”

The principal investigating body of the Senate is not helpless. Today witnesses from Treasury and C.I.A., as well as its own investigators, will present evidence that the huge rip-off engineered by Saddam Hussein - with the connivance of corrupt U.N. officials and companies protected by Security Council members like Russia and France - was even greater than the $10 billion figure estimated by our G.A.O. Going back to 1991 and including the predecessor to oil-for-food, an outside source tells me that the U.N.-maladministered profiteering reached $23 billion. Such heavy spending affects U.N. votes.

Indeed it does. Is there any hope for the UN? I don’t really think there is.

Police: Driver Tried to Run Over Katherine Harris

A Florida motorist was arrested on Wednesday on charges of trying to run down U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris at an intersection where the controversial former state elections chief was campaigning for re-election to Congress.

…

No one was hurt. Witnesses noted the car’s license tag number and police tracked the owner, Barry Seltzer, 46, of Sarasota, who was jailed early Wednesday on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He said he was annoyed because some of Harris’ supporters were blocking traffic, the arrest report said.

“I was exercising my political expression,” it quoted him as saying. “I did not run them down, I scared them a little.”

That’s not “political expression", dumbo, at best it’s road-rage. At worst, it’s attempted murder.

Suspected burglar found dead in store’s air duct

A man who was found dead in a ventilation shaft at a Fort Bend County convenience store apparently became trapped while trying to burglarize the building, authorities said Monday.

The unidentified man was found about 8:30 a.m. Monday by an employee of the Amigo Express Drive-In Market in the 3000 block of Fifth Street near Stafford, said sheriff’s Capt. Jerry Clements.

The employee was opening the store for business when he noticed feet protruding from a ventilation exhaust duct, Clements said. Police found the body wedged in the 12-inch-wide shaft.

Darwin award nominee here.

Marijuana ‘petition’ actually voter registration form

Students, who last month signed a petition that was being circulated on the Blue Bell campus to legalize marijuana for primarily medicinal purposes, now are finding out that they are registered Republicans.

Soros-supported voter-registration drive probed

Billionaire currency trader George Soros, in his quest to unseat President Bush, has given millions of dollars to a coalition of anti-Bush organizations whose nationwide voter-registration drive has been targeted by state and federal authorities for possible widespread fraud.

It is unacceptable to fraudulently register people. I don’t care whose side you are on. Stop it.

Saddam’s Sugar Daddy

CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.

As Duelfer documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.’s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. As set up and run by the U.N., Oil-for-Food devolved into a depraved and increasingly dangerous mockery of what was advertised by the U.N. as a relief program for sick and starving Iraqis.

The report notes that the start of Oil-for-Food, in 1996, marked the revival of Saddam’s post-Gulf War fortunes. His regime amassed some $11 billion in illicit funds between the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and his overthrow by the U.S.-led Coalition in 2003. Most of that money flowed in from 1996-2003, during the era of Oil-for-Food. One might add that what allowed this dirty money to stack up was U.N. policy — urged along and overseen by Annan, in the name of aid — that allowed Saddam to import the equipment to revive Iraq’s oil production, all of it accruing to Saddam. Saddam’s regime had virtually no other source of income; there was no tax base. It was out of these oil flows, condoned (but not well metered) by the U.N., that Saddam derived virtually all income for the astounding roster of political bribery and illicit arms transactions detailed in this report.

Saddam followed a deliberate strategy of using bribes in such forms as contracts for cheap oil via the U.N. program, or outright gifts of vouchers for oil pumped under U.N. supervision, to gain political influence abroad. He grossly violated U.N. rules, with illicit trade agreements, oil smuggling, and arms deals (conventional, but still deadly) — and the U.N. did not stop him. By 2001, Saddam was able to thwart many of the constraints sanctions were meant to impose on his regime. His strategy, notes the Duelfer report, succeeded “to the point where sitting members of the Security Council were actively violating resolutions passed by the Security Council.”

The full report is available here, along with a summary.