Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd has been arrested on apparently bogus charges from 2002.
Indian police have attacked women who reported violence. A protest against this was banned.
Hard evidence that sharing movies doesn't mean movies can't be profitable.
The article repeats the movie company propaganda by calling sharing "piracy". To use that term is to support the War on Sharing; please join me in refusing to use it.
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Twenty years after the Rio Earth summit, our environment has got worse.
Nuclear reactors are a bad investment. UK electric companies have funny ways of saying that.
The Heatland Institute is taking plenty of heat for its absurd billboards that compared recognition of global heating to being a mass murderer.
It is a pleasure to see greedy bastards stumble, but those that wish to pay for global heating denialism will find another organ to use.
This discussion of the death penalty in the US ends with an interesting observation of where it is used and why.
If you want to discourage something, the effective way is to punish it most of the time. Punishing it severely but rarely tends not to work.
Carl Malamud campaigns to make US legal requirements publicly available on the Internet.
Don't Buy the Spin: How Cutting the Pentagon's Budget Could Boost the Economy.
First giflib release since I reassumed the lead. Short version: lots of useless old cruft thrown out, everything Coverity-scanned, one minor resource leak found and fixed.
As I’ve previously noted, this code was in astonishingly good shape considering its great age. I vigorously beat the dust out of it with Coverity and cppcheck, but found only one very minor bug that way – a malloc leak following a malloc failure in the code that makes color-table structures. I think it is rather likely this case has never actually been triggered.
I retired six utilities, added a bunch of documentation and made it HTML-able, fixed a minor bug in how output GIF versions are computed in an upward-compatible way, and fixed a thread-safety problem. I added a rudimentary regression-test suite; this could use some more work. All tracker bugs have been resolved and closed.
Next release, 5.0, will make one very minor change in the API near extension blocks.
MP for the Independence Party Árni Johnsen arranged for the relocation of a 30-ton boulder, which he believes is home to three generations of elves, from Sandskeið on Hellisheiði in southwest Iceland to his home Höfðaból in the Westman Islands today.Árni first encountered the elves’ dwelling when he was in a serious car accident in January 2010. His car overturned and landed beside the boulder 40 meters away from the highway, Morgunblaðið reports.
His SUV was damaged beyond repair but Árni escaped the accident unharmed. He considered whether the boulder might be a dwelling for hidden people and had it saved from landing underneath the south Iceland Ring Road when the highway was widened.
“I had Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a specialist in the affairs of elves from Álfagarðurinn in Hellisgerði, Hafnarfjörður, to come look at the boulder with me,” recollected Árni. “She said it was incredible, that she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before.”
“She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor,” the MP described.
The specialist concluded that the boulder’s inhabitants were content with the move. “But they asked whether the boulder could stand on grass. I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass. ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied,” Árni continued.
The specialist also said that the elves wish for the boulder’s “window side” to face the view. “I promised to do so,” Árni stated.
The boulder will be moved on the ferry Herjólfur and the elves will travel in a basket lined with sheep skin so that they can be comfortable on the journey.
Ragnhildur explained to Árni that when he was in the accident everything went crazy on Hellisheiði. Elves from all neighboring settlements were called out and there was much confusion until one large being took control of the situation.
“Ragnhildur said it was my protecting spirit, because my time hadn’t come,” he concluded.
Also: Angry Elves Said to Have Wreaked Havoc in West Fjords
Vigdís Kristín Steinthórsdóttir, a nurse, healer and hypnotist, believes hidden people, or elves, who live in the mountain were upset when the tunnel through Óshlíd was made and are causing these mishaps.
Renouncing Citizenship Makes Facebook Co-Founder Inadmissable To US
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship just in time to avoid a large tax payment essentially means he will not be able to re-enter the United States again, immigration experts say."There's a specific provision of immigration law that says that a former citizen who officially renounces citizenship, and is determined to have renounced it for the purpose of avoiding taxation, is excludable," said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "So he would not be able to return to the United States if he's found to have renounced for tax purposes."
The provision of law isn't usually enforced, added Williams, "however, this guy is so high profile that this is probably going to be the test case."
[...] Two immigration lawyers said his explanation hardly passes the laugh test. Saverin's move was timed to the initial public offering of shares of Facebook stock. The valuation of the Facebook IPO explodes Saverin stake in the social media company to some $3 billion, on which avoiding taxes could save him at least tens -- if not hundreds -- of millions of dollars. Nor does it help his case that he relocated to Singapore, which levies no taxes on those earnings.
Two senators mobilized Thursday to crack down on Saverin and other tax dodgers.
"He's fucked," said Adam Green, an immigration lawyer based in Los Angeles. "He must have gotten horrendous advice."
It's plausible that Saverin simply decided the money he'd save would be worth saying goodbye to the United States forever.
$100M is 3.3% of $3B. It's a rounding error to this bozo, but he thinks it's very important that he give none of that back to the people who made his lottery win possible. Bravo, Sir, you are a true Hero of Capitalism.
First off, "world domination" is not the only metric, nor the most useful one in every case. We have tens of millions of users around the world and I'm sure they'd appreciate it if we didn't forget them. I am one of them, and I know I certainly feel that way. You may be as well.
There's another aspect to that article: it suggests concentrating on mobile. Now .. where have I heard that before? Oh, right: everyone saying the desktop is dead, long live the web, we should focus all our efforts there.
Wake up call #1: hundreds of millions of laptop and desktop systems are sold each year. It's a market that isn't going away. Nothing is "killing" it. It is being displaced to some extent, but it isn't going away. It's less interesting because it isn't growing, and the corporate drive for ever increasing profits thus stamps it as "mature, boring." This is different from "dead."
Wake up call #2: there is no reason we can't do desktop and mobile and web. Yes, "and", not "or". Free software projects could create very compelling horizontal integration between these sectors as long as we treat them as not being mutually exclusive choices. This is part of the strategy of both Apple and Microsoft (and others), and the market would berate either for saying that they were abandoning some of these tech segments to focus exclusively on one. In KDE, our focus on the desktop has been extended to devices and the web in the last few years, and that's a good thing, something that should be supported. Which brings me to:
Wake up call #3: If people engaged in supporting Free software can't manage to keep long term focus, not freak out and continue to support the efforts that are ongoing ... we're screwed. We are, and will be, our own best friends or our own worst enemies. It starts by not telling others to stop supporting the efforts of thousands of volunteers and companies from around the world. That is, simply put, a betrayal.
A sophisticated view would be an examination of how we can draw together the efforts and successes of mobile for the desktop to give it a boost; to analyze how Free software desktop products and Free software mobile and web products can integrate and work well together.
There are projects and teams out there doing exactly that right now. Several teams in KDE are doing exactly that, and we mean business. It would be nice to not have to keep pulling knives out of our backs from journalists as we continue pushing forward. Long live Free software on the desktop, mobile, web and server!
My regular readers will know that (a) I’ve recently been pounding bugs out of GPSD with Coverity, and (b) I hate doing stupid clicky-dances on websites when I think I ought to be able to shove them a programmatically-generated job card that tells them what to do.
So, here’s a side-effect of my recent work with Coverity: coverity-submit. Set up a config file once, and afterwards just run coverity-submit in your project directory and stand back. Supports multiple projects. Because, manularity is evil.
Here’s the HTML documentation.
So, I saw these guys at SXSW and bailed on them after 1.5 songs because they were 15 minutes late, and then did a 15 minute sound check, and I had places to be -- you do not pull that shit at a festival like that. Anyway, several people said they had a great live show, which I did not even remotely experience in that song and a half, so I gave them another shot, but I didn't experience it again tonight. Now let me be clear -- it sounded great, and I love their recorded material, and you should buy their album, but they have no show. People who think they have a show must be comparing them to DJs instead of to bands. It's true that the vocalist did occasional fills over the canned drum track, but when the drum-heavy song starts, and the person with sticks in her hands is just standing there bobbing her head... that's a fuckin' problem for me.
If this sounds like the band that you are in, please, for the love of all that is rock and roll: befriend a bass player and/or a drummer. Don't let your mere enthusiasm be the Maginot Line between you and karaoke. You won't sound that different, and people who have actually seen a show will think they are seeing one again.
Also, here's our Fuck You Apple moment for the evening:
Let's say the show has just ended, and you're leaning against the bar looking at the photos on your phone, select the two you like, hit "Share", and pound out a bitchy blog post like the one above... and then you decide, "I'd better pop over to Safari and make sure I spelled 'Maginot' correctly..." then you go back to the Photos app, and your post is gone. So you check the Drafts folder in the Mail app, and, no, it's gone.
So you have to re-type it from memory. Fuck You Apple.
It is 1992 and I am at House of Usher. But I don't remember the 3rd floor of DV8 being so spacious.
But, holy hell, there were twenty-five minutes of trailers before the movie started, beginning at the posted show time. Not even counting the (presumed) half hour of non-movie commercials before show time, which I missed.
Is 25 minutes the new normal? I remember being aghast when 15 became the new normal from 10, which seems like it wasn't that long ago.
With that many commercials -- about 1/5th of the running time of the movie itself -- why am I expected to pay admission too? I understood that my eyeballs were the product in this sale.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.