Category — General

War Profiteering (Halliburton Dept.): Following An Ancient if Not Honorable Tradition. You might think that amidst all this ‘we support our troops’ rhetoric emanating from secure locations in Washington D.C. that someone in the white house or the Pentagon would be making sure that our troops get fed decent food. Nope. Think again. According to Heather Yarbrough, what we’ve got is a system in which someone whose job is monitoring the quality and safety of food served to soldiers on U.S. military bases in Iraq gets fired for doing her job. Talk about history repeating itself. President Abraham Lincoln secured passage of the False Claims Act in 1863 in order to combat similar frauds against the Union Army, including the sale of rancid food for the troops. Did Heather Yarbrough run afoul of a rush for profits, a system which depends on paying third-world workers pittances and of course no benefits, and gets third-world sanitation practices in return? Or did she just rile an old boy network? Either way, if her charges regarding the way soldiers’ food is stored and prepared are correct, it’s a scandal. Freezers and refrigerators weren’t working. Food was spoiling. The kitchen workers were exhausted, and some of them weren’t following basic sanitation practices. “It became apparent… [Discourse.net]

Greatest game ever.. Greatest online game ever. (flash, and turn the sound up). I know it's not friday, but I'm hungover and cold so it feels like friday. And this game doth so rule. [MetaFilter]

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wow, greatest game ever, arrow keys for navigation for you mouse-i-files.

OECD Workshop on Spam.

The OECD will hold a workshop on Spam from 2-3 February in Brussels .

The objective of this workshop is to explore the growing problem of spam, with a focus on the international dimension. Participants will:

• Identify common characteristics, sources and statistics of spam.
• Examine the variety of approaches to combat spam.
• Examine the degree to which these approaches have been successful.
• Consider next steps with a view to increasing international co-operation to address the issue.

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

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it will be interesting to see whether this has any outcomes

Academic Bill of Rights. This is truly a bad idea. In an effort to rein in liberal professors at Colorado colleges and universities, a… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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I've commented on this before, it is a horrible idea. It is not a bill of rights, but a bill of repression and elimination of the free exchange of ideas, in short, it is not an academic bill of rights, but a bill of anti-rights in general.

Backlash against OA models?. Stephen Downes, 2004: The Turning Point, Ubiquity v.4,no.46 (January 20-26, 2004). Downes offers an assessment of “issues that will change the way we use the internet.” One section, headlined “Attacking Open Content,” says that media industries will attempt a backlash against freely-available alternatives to their products. Alongside open courseware and open source, Downes mentions “Open access journals are forcing publishers to retrench.” He sees the attack happening on both “legislative” – through intellectual property and legal channels – and “promotional” – or negative advertising on the stability of open content. Finally, Downes calls such attacks “a last desperate gasp before the bottom falls out of the content industry completely… Content is well on its way to being a value-add, something that you might attach to a product, but not something that is the product. Apple uses music to sell iPods, not iPods to sell music.” (Source: The ((sci-tech) library question) [Open Access News]

IS HE . . . NORMAL?. Peggy Noonan has a point: Let me assert something that I cannot prove with a poll but that is based on serious conversations the past… [OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY]

create your own visited country map
or

well i assume it is this new virus going around causing my email to be slowed by, it looks like an hour now, and i would expect two. i wish peopel would start actually maintaining their machines to prevent worms and virus's from spreading, even though i know that it is virtually impossible to do in windows… they could at least diversify their mail clients to prevent alot of this crap from happening.

from www.m-w.com

Main Entry: folály
Pronunciation: 'fŠ-lE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural follies
Etymology: Middle English folie, from Old French, from folfool
1 : lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight
2 a : criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct b obsolete : EVIL, WICKEDNESS; especially : lewd behavior
3 : a foolish act or idea
4 : an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking
5 : an often extravagant picturesque building erected to suit a fanciful taste

just felt like reminding people about the nature of folly.

this was bound to happen, let's not talk about the money involved though, that would make things seem wasteful, no? vt is replacing its big mac cluster already.
here's slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/27/1257256&mode=thread&tid=107&tid=187