ABC News: Where Big Brother Watches and Talks to You :
The monitors in Middlesbrough’s CCTV control room show a drunk put back a traffic cone, a vandal replace a strip light he had pulled off the roof of a pizza joint, and a smoker pick up his cigarette butt from the sidewalk.

Why did they correct their infractions? The operator in the control room spotted their actions, and a disembodied voice coming from a speaker attached to a CCTV camera stopped the offenders in their tracks. It seems to work.

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polite perhaps, terrorizing certainly….

Discworld Cake:
The Discworld Cake
Made for my daughter’s wedding.

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way cool

Library Cats Map:
LIBRARY
CATS MAP

Click on a region (or
state) to see a list of library cats!

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yes, the library cats map still exists.

Google Code – Updates: Announcing Tesseract OCR:
We wanted to let you all know that a few months ago we quietly released – or actually re-released – an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source. You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.This particular OCR engine, called Tesseract, was in fact not originally developed at Google!
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tesseract is a new open source ocr tool by google.

Open-ILS.org | Home of the Evergreen ILS.:
This is information central for the development effort of an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), named Evergreen.
This software is being developed and maintained by the Georgia Public Library Service for
use by the Georgia Library PINES Program, a consortium
of 252 public libraries. This software can be downloaded for free, and anyone can contribute to development efforts.

The PINES-Evergreen production system is located at gapines.org.

A public demo of Evergreen’s online catalog is located at demo.gapines.org. A
bleeding edge online catalog, with all of the latest, greatest features we’re working on, is located at
dev.gapines.org (note the development site may be unstable). The staff client is available from the
downloads section.

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pines evergreen is a ILS of the open source variety.

The Belmont Club: Censorship by the military?:
Pajamas Media recently reported that there are only 9 embedded reporters in
Iraq. Many are blaming this on the media, and while I can never be called an
apologist for mainstream media, I can say with certainty that the United
States military is censoring.

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censorship can be appropriate, it really depends on how it is done. here, i think it is overstepping the purpose. you can limit knowledge to enable strategic goals, but if you prevent knowledge after those strategies are implemented, you are doing wrong.

GOP leaders knew of Foley e-mail in ‘05 – Yahoo! News:
GOP leaders admit their offices have known for months that a Florida Republican congressman was sending inappropriate e-mails to a boy who had worked as a page in the House of Representatives.

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this seems to indicate that the GOP leaders worked to suppress evidence of child sexual abuse. that is immoral and i suspect illegal. the worst part is that they are supposed to be against child abuse, but here they are conspiring to support an alleged abuser.