Monthly Archive for October, 2008
… ignore the voters.
Emotional and often outspoken council members voted 29-22 in favor of the extension that now allows officeholders three consecutive four-year terms. About two-thirds of the City Council is currently in their second term.
We voted for them in 1993 and again in 1996 but the New York City Communists Council has decided that those pesky term limits the voters want don’t really need to apply to them.
I can’t wait to get out of here.
but, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about…
When the government moved a few years ago to a new electronic passport designed to foil counterfeiting, GPO led the work of contracting with vendors to install the technology.
Each new e-passport contains a small computer chip inside the back cover that contains the passport number along with the photo and other personal data of the holder. The data is secured and is transmitted through a tiny wire antenna when it is scanned electronically at border entry points and compared to the actual traveler carrying it.
According to interviews and documents, GPO managers rejected limiting the contracts to U.S.-made computer chip makers and instead sought suppliers from several countries, including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands.
…
After the computer chips are inserted into the back cover of the passports in Europe, the blank covers are shipped to a factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand, north of Bangkok, to be fitted with a wire Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, antenna. The blank passports eventually are transported to Washington for final binding, according to the documents and interviews.
The stop in Thailand raises its own security concerns. The Southeast Asian country has battled social instability and terror threats. Anti-government groups backed by Islamists, including al Qaeda, have carried out attacks in southern Thailand and the Thai military took over in a coup in September 2006.The Netherlands-based company that assembles the U.S. e-passport covers in Thailand, Smartrac Technology Ltd., warned in its latest annual report that, in a worst-case scenario, social unrest in Thailand could lead to a halt in production.
Smartrac divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America’s e-passports.
…little tiny handcuffs?
One of the pigeons was caught near a rose water production plant in the city of Kashan in Isfahan province, the report cited an unnamed informed source as saying, adding that some metal rings and invisible strings were attached to the bird.
“Early this month, a black pigeon was caught bearing a blue-coated metal ring, with invisible strings,” the source was quoted as saying of the second pigeon.
The source gave no further description of the pigeons, neither their current status nor what their fate will be.
Natanz is home to Iran’s heavily-bunkered underground uranium enrichment plant, which is not far from Kashan.
If you’re currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and you have evidence on your laptop, there’s nothing better than a break-in and theft to help dispose of it.
I’m just sayin’.
Boston police told WBZ Friday that three Dell laptop computers were stolen from the group’s Dorchester office around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday.
According to police, the alarm had also been ripped from the wall and wires had been damaged.
The police report says two downstairs offices also were ransacked, two vending machines were damaged and change stolen from them.
A representative from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now said he did not know if the break-in was politically motivated, but called the timing “suspicious.”
SNL’s takes on the subprime mortgage pyramid scheme over at Pat Dollard.
Go watch, share and spread.
it’s douchebags (pun intended) like this that give people the impression that us creative people are all asshats.
Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, but Significance Is Unclear
By KENNETH CHANG
The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.
The Sun goes through a regular 11-year cycle, and it is now emerging from the quietest part of the cycle, or solar minimum. But even for this phase it has been unusually quiet, with little roiling of the magnetic fields that induce sunspots.
“It’s starting with a murmur,” said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.
In another sign of solar quiescence, scientists reported last month that the solar wind, a rush of charged particles continually spewed from the Sun at a million miles an hour, had diminished to its lowest level in 50 years.
Scientists are not sure why this minimum has been especially minimal, and the episode is even playing into the global warming debate. Some wonder if this could be the start of an extended period of solar indolence that would more than offset the warming effect of human-made carbon dioxide emissions. From the middle of the 17th century to the early 18th, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, sunspots were extremely rare, and the reduced activity coincided with lower temperatures in what is known as the Little Ice Age.
Maybe now is a good time to think about moving somewhere with a bit milder climate… 
326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct on primary election day in September. Their votes were captured on a computer cartridge, but the Board of Elections says when it put the cartridge into the citywide computer to be counted, 1,500 write in votes appeared from nowhere. The board completed its investigation of what might have happened and blames static electricity.
I’d be interested to find out who those extra 1,500 votes were for…
Two days later, in Cincinnati, he said al-Qaida has re-established a safe haven and it’s not in Baghdad. “It’s in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said, “where my helicopter was recently forced down.”
At a Sept. 9, fundraiser, Biden addressed his national security credentials by talking about “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down. John McCain wants to know where bin Ladin and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where. That’s where al-Qaida is. That’s where bin Ladin is.”
THE FACTS: In February, Biden and fellow senators John Kerry and Chuck Hagel were flying in a helicopter over Afghanistan in a fact-finding trip when a snowstorm closed in.
“It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges,” Kerry told The Associated Press afterward. “So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed.”
He said the group waited for about three hours until a convoy with U.S. troops took them to Bagram Air Base.
“We sat up there and traded stories,” Kerry joked. “We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to do it.”
He added: “Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”
The area was reported as not being under Taliban control. But Wade noted “it’s the wild west out there” and the senators were transported under guard and with air cover from an F-16.