Hilarant.
Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside.
"The noise!" he complained.
"What noise?" the grownups asked.
Now 39, Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day--that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can--to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.
The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.
Stapleton, a security consultant whose experience in installing store alarms and the like alerted him to the gravity of the loitering problem, studied other teenage-repellents as part of his research. Some shops, for example, use "zit lamps," which drive teenagers away by casting a blue light onto their spotty skin, accentuating any whiteheads and other blemishes.
30.11.05
Bientôt au Square Berri
Préparez-vous à un gouvernement Martin majoritaire
Premier jour de campagne, premier engagement de Stephen Harper. Le Parti conservateur, s'il est porté au pouvoir le 23 janvier, déposera une motion à la Chambre des communes pour rétablir la définition traditionnelle du mariage.
M. Harper est donc prêt à rouvrir ce débat douloureux qui a divisé le Parlement au cours des trois dernières années. En juin, la Chambre des communes a adopté un projet de loi reconnaissant les mariages gais.
29.11.05
We can...
...put two and two together.
Notez que le dernier article date de janvier 2005, juste assez de temps pour que les effets se fassent sentir.
Le salaire des enseignants lié au rendement des élèves ?
Incroyablement bonne comme idée dans le contexte d'une pénurie grandissante de profs. Ils vont bien sûr se ruer aux portes des écoles défavorisées.
Des parents canadiens estiment que le salaire des enseignants devrait être déterminé en fonction des performances académiques des élèves.
C'est ce qu'indique une enquête nationale qui a été menée auprès d'environ 4000 parents et enseignants. Le National Post élabore sur cette étude qui doit être publiée aujourd'hui (mardi) par la Société pour l'avancement de l'excellence en éducation, un organisme de la Colombie-Britannique.
Les parents et les enseignants interrogés lors d'un sondage affirment que l'expérience et le développement professionnel devraient être considérés au moment de déterminer le salaire des enseignants.
Mais 80 pour cent des parents veulent qu'une portion de ce salaire soit déterminée en fonction du progrès académique de leurs élèves. Or, seulement 38 pour cent des enseignants interrogés sont de cet avis.
CDs + DRM?
= perte de $$$. C'est la faute des pirates, sans doute. Extrait:
The music industry needs to adjust to this new reality, because it's here to stay. The BBC reports that a whole generation of Europeans no longer see music as something that ought to be paid for. Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan warns that children are being raised on a "limitless diet of free and disposable music." He sees this, unsurprisingly, as a Bad Thing (tm), but only time will tell if file-swapping music lovers are shooting themselves in the foot by putting the labels out of business, or whether they are making possible the growth of a new, artist-driven economy where even niche bands can earn a living.
La conférence de Montréal
"We're going to resist it, obviously," said Harlan Watson, head of the U.S. delegation.
Bientôt aux USA..
A Russian lawyer plans to take his case against The Simpsons to the European Court of Human Rights.
It comes after a Moscow Court rejected Igor Smykov's appeal to have the show banned from Russian TV.
Mr Smykov wanted to have the cartoon series taken off the air in Russia, or at least shown at a later time, claiming it promoted drugs, violence and homosexuality.
He also demanded £6,000 in compensation from TV channel REN-TV saying the show had morally damaged his nine-year-old son.
La censure à PBS
Entrevue avec Bill Moyers, anciennement de l'émission Now.
Did you get any direct pressure from Tomlinson or CPB to change the content of your show?
The people at PBS told me they were getting excruciating pressure because of our reporting, including threats to de-fund public television unless “Moyers is dealt with.” They never identified the source of that pressure.
Eric Alterman
du magazine Slate est particulièrement en forme. Extrait:
If Jose Padilla lives in a police state, then so do you. According to Adam Liptak in the invaluable, but frequently infuriating, New York Times,
“When Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced last week that Jose Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants.
...
The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla's case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court. Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla's status, just days before the government's legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case. "The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."
Tell me, what is the relevance of the U.S. Constitution to such a process? And if the Constitution has no relevance for Mr. Padilla, who is after all, a U.S. citizen, how can you be sure it will be there for you? First they came for the gypsies…
28.11.05
Michael Brown
..se trouve un nouvel emploi.
Just so, disgraced US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) head Michael Brown has decided to share the secrets of his incompetence with paying customers of his new outfit, Michael D. Brown, LLC. That's right, the fellow who, on assignment in a devastated New Orleans, whinged bitchily about needing more time for a proper hot meal, and who gushed about his new suit ("I am a fashion god!") while the city drowned in the filthy waters of Lake Ponchartrain is about to instruct the masses on what he calls "disaster preparedness."
La réforme des CPE
Une autre réussite signée Jean Charest.
Extrait:
L'expansion des garderies commerciales pose des questions d'ordre éthique. La Fondation Chagnon, parmi d'autres, s'oppose à ce que l'on permette à des entreprises privées de faire du profit avec l'éducation des enfants en bas âge. Cette critique ne fera peut-être pas l'unanimité. Mais est-il permis de demander pourquoi un gouvernement qui avait promis, par ailleurs, de réduire les subventions aux entreprises, a augmenté celles accordées aux garderies commerciales au point qu'elles reçoivent aujourd'hui 85 % du montant versé à un CPE (pour les enfants âgés de 18 mois à cinq ans).
Belle façon pour un entrepreneur de se constituer un actif, à même les fonds publics, y compris d'acquérir des immobilisations qui, en vertu du projet de loi n° 124, demeurent sa propriété entière, qu'il pourra revendre, après avoir reçu des subventions pendant des années, avec un profit substantiel.
Il est clair que la privatisation du réseau est un objectif poursuivi par le gouvernement libéral sans que celui-ci eût jamais justifié ce choix ni au regard de l'utilisation des fonds publics à cette fin ni au regard de la qualité des services et des autres fonctions sociales des CPE.
Les dessous de l'administration Bush.
À lire. Extrait:
The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."
The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."
According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."
Sony DRM (suite)
Il est maintenant connu que les employés du sous-contractant de Sony ont volé une partie du code utilisé par le schème DRM qu'ils ont fourni à ces derniers, mais celle-là, elle est pas mal. Via Boingboing.
Seymour Hersh
Un très bon article.
The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.
“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”
Winning hearts and minds
Des mercenaires en Irak s'amusent à tirer sur des voitures, pour le plaisir. Smells like victory.
26.11.05
Dahlia Lithwick à propos du dangeureux José Padilla
Had Padilla been charged and tried back in the summer of 2002, rather than touted as some Bond villain—the Prince of Radiological Dispersion—his case would have stood for a simple legal proposition: that if you are a terrorist, a supporter of terrorism, or a would-be terrorist, the government will hunt you down and punish you. Had the government waited, tested its facts, kept expectations low, then delivered a series of convictions of even small-time al-Qaida foot soldiers, we in this country would feel safer and we would doubtless be safer. Instead Padilla, like Hamdi, was used as fodder for big speeches. They became the justification for Bush's position that some people are so evil that the law does not deter them, that new legal systems must be invented—new systems that bear a striking resemblance to those discredited around the time of Torquemada.
The facts of the Hamdi, Padilla, Lindh, Moussaoui, and other terror cases have never mapped onto the propaganda used to sell them. The trouble, yet again, is those bedeviled facts. The problem the Bush administration keeps having with the legal system is that no matter how long you stall, speechify, and deny, in the end it all comes down to facts—facts that become increasingly inconvenient with every passing day.
C'est Nöwell...
Via Americablog.
The official start to the holiday shopping season kicked off with something less than cheer and good will yesterday morning when an Orlando, Fla., man was wrestled to the ground by security guards at a Wal-Mart store after he tried to cut into a line of people waiting for discount laptops.
Here's a look back at two decades of buyers behaving badly, as chronicled in various media reports:
# December 2004 - Two women and a teenage girl are arrested after they get into a fight over a parking space near a Toys "R" Us in West Hartford, Conn. One woman threw an orange peel at the other woman's car.
# December 2002 - A 41-year-old man is arrested after stealing another motorist's parking space, yelling at the driver and eventually spraying him with Mace at a mall in Connecticut.
# November 2002 - Shoppers stampede a Riverside, Calif., Wal-Mart store, running over a 35-year-old woman and fracturing her foot and hip.
# November 1998 - Frantic "Furby" shoppers bite one woman and knock another down at a Wal-Mart in O'Fallon, Ill.
# December 1996 - A Wal-Mart employee in New Brunswick, Canada, is sent to the hospital after a crowd of 300 "Tickle Me Elmo" shoppers tramples him.
# December 1993 - Drivers abandon their cars in the streets outside a Toronto shopping center, eager to get to the day-after-Christmas sales. A police officer said he ran out of $20 parking-ticket slips ticketing the vehicles.
# December 1992 - A 24-year-old clerk at a Toronto Sport Shoppe in Canada is kicked, punched and bitten by a group trying to grab products from shelves. Four people were arrested, and the clerk was sent to the hospital.
# November 1983 - A 75-year-old man is knocked down by shoppers trying to get to Cabbage Patch dolls at a Jefferson Ward store in North Miami Beach, Fla. That same month, shoppers in Washington, D.C., offer bribes to store clerks for access to the dolls.
Pour les sites qui vous demandent de vous enregistrer, je vous suggère (si vous ne connaissiez pas) Bugmenot.
Bombarder Al-Jazeera
The White House has said the allegation that Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera is "so outlandish" it does not merit a response.
Outlandish?
We also recall that the Americans have form when it comes to the mass media outlets of regimes they dislike. They blew up the Kabul bureau of al-Jazeera in 2002, and they pulverised the Baghdad bureau in April 2003, killing one of the reporters. In 1999 they managed to blow up the Serb TV station, killing two make-up girls, in circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained.
25.11.05
Les organismes religieux devraient-ils avoir le droit de discriminer?
Via C&L.
Pourrais-je enfin devenir Soeur Grise?
24.11.05
The Aristocrats
Excellent.
Comedy veterans and co-creators Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza capitalize on their insider status and invite over 100 of their closest friends--who happen to be some of the biggest names in entertainment, from George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Cary to Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, Paul Reiser and Sarah Silverman--to reminisce, analyze, deconstruct and deliver their their own versions of world's dirtiest joke, an old burlesque, too extreme to be performed in public, called The Aristocrats.
C'est l'histoire d'un...
Exclusion des gais de la prêtrise (suite)
Le Vatican souligne que l'ordination n'est pas «un droit» et en appelle à la vigilance de tous ceux qui participent à la formation des séminaristes. Les «directeurs spirituels» qui accompagnent individuellement les candidats au jour le jour sont tenus au secret mais doivent dissuader ceux chez lesquels ils discerneraient «des tendances homosexuelles profondément enracinées».
Donc, le contenu des confessions sera retenu contre celui qui se confesse.
On se précipitait déjà aux portes des séminaires pour devenir prêtre et j'imagine que ceci va accélérer le processus.
Mort d'un dinosaure en direct.
La haine
Un bon article ce matin dans le NYT sur le lien entre les événements en France et la vision qu'en avaient certains artistes qui les ont, d'une certaine manière, pressentis.
23.11.05
Si vous pensiez que le développement de la démocratie au Moyen-Orient passait par l'émergence d'une presse libre...
... détrompez-vous.
...the Daily Mirror reported that the US president last year planned to attack the Arabic television station al-Jazeera, which has its headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where US and British bombers were based.
Put on your tinfoil hats
and click here.
Ne me blâmez pas si la CIA vient vous chercher pendant la nuit.
L'église catholique
NYT: A new Vatican document excludes from the priesthood most gay men, with few exceptions, banning in strong and specific language candidates "who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called 'gay culture.'"
A doctrinal conservative who served as John Paul's defender of the faith for two decades, he spoke out before his election against "filth" in the church, which many observers speculated was a reference to the need to clean up the church after the scandals involving sexually abusive priests.
Les priorités: banissons les prêtres qui "supportent la culture gaie" et taisons les abus des prêtres pédophiles.
22.11.05
Les prisons secrètes de la CIA
L'information se précise:
Dans sa note, Dick Marty [président de la commission des questions juridiques et des droits de l'Homme de l'Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l'Europe] précise avoir contacté le centre satellitaire de l'UE à Torrejon (Espagne) pour obtenir des images de sites en Pologne et en Roumanie, qui pourraient abriter, selon Human Rights Watch, des possibles centres secrets de détention de la CIA. D'après HRW, il s'agit de la base aérienne militaire de Kogalniceanu (Roumanie) et de l'aéroport Szczytno-Szymany (Pologne).
Gm: réactions
Global economics, local wreckonomics. With yesterday's announcement by General Motors that it plans to eliminate 22 per cent of its Canadian workforce in the next three years, GM will undoubtedly be seen as an epithet for "Globalized Madness" by the 3,900 workers facing job losses at plants in Oshawa and St. Catharines.
That, at least, is how Canadian Auto Workers Union President Buzz Hargrove sees it. Representing an overall loss of 30,000 jobs in Canada and the United States, the nine North American plant closings by General Motors are, in Hargrove's view, a measure of Washington and Ottawa's failure to force Japan and South Korea to open their domestic car markets while letting those countries flood ours.
C'est surtout pas parce que GM a construit des modèles de merde pendant trop longtemps, et qu'ils ont, deux fois plutôt qu'une, ignoré le fait que le prix de l'essence, il PEUT AUGMENTER. Pfff.
21.11.05
Les faussetés de StatsCan
Selon une nouvelle étude qui a tracé le profil des «carrières criminelles» de 59 000 jeunes, la majorité des jeunes qui ont des contacts avec les tribunaux de la jeunesse et les tribunaux de juridiction criminelle pour adultes au Canada sont des non-récidivistes.
L'étude a révélé que la majorité de ces jeunes n'ont comparu en cour qu'une seule fois, ce qui dément l'idée que la plupart des jeunes qui viennent en contact avec les tribunaux deviennent des délinquants chroniques.
Ceci ne nous permet pas de conclure quoi que ce soit. Il faudrait comparer les taux de récidive selon que les jeunes ont comparu ou non. Ou est-ce que l'on cherche à nous faire avaler la judiciarisation de tels cas?
Council of Conservative Citizens: Americans are Europeans
We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people.
Quelqu'un dans ce groupe devrait dire à leurs membres qu'ils arrêtent d'attaquer les Français et les Allemands.
NYTimes: Official. G.M. to Cut 30,000 Jobs and Close 12 Facilities in 3 Years
Shares of G.M. were up 10 cents, to $24.15, on the New York Stock Exchange around midday.
J'ai une idée. Faites de plus gros V.U.S.. De quoi avez-vous peur?
Rogers (ISP) in Canada puts software on their networks that prevents activity for BitTorrents, P2P, IRC
Via Boingboing:
Hi Everyone,
Over the past month Rogers (ISP) in Canada has put some software on their networks that prevents activity for BitTorrents, P2P, IRC, and also along with that is a rule that if you are trying to download a large media file from more then 1 server it will be dropped. When you download a Podcast from iTunes it downloads that file from multiple servers in the background (I confirmed this by watching my cable modem logs). As soon as it tries to use more than 2 different servers for the download, it just stops. That's the reason why Podcast downloads stop at random places - it's the point where a 2nd server is involved in the download. The same issue causes timeouts and cut-offs in the iTunes music store.
Here is the problem - when anyone calls Rogers about the problem they say it is either a router, firewall or Apple problem and they shrug you off.
Hundreds or thousands of people in Canada can no longer get Podcasts or purchase music from the iTunes Music store. This is BAD. Please, Apple, contact Rogers and sort it out. So many people have called Rogers with no luck.
De mieux en mieux.
P2P is good.
First is the differential impact of file-sharing on an artist depending on their existing popularity. According to Blackburn who investigates this issue the 'bottom' 3/4 of artists sell more as a consequence of file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell less. Second is the first tentative estimates (by Waldfogel and Rob) of the welfare consequences of file-sharing. Waldfogel and Rob's dramatic result is that file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three times the loss to the music industry in lost sales. While, as they emphasize, this result is preliminary and based on limited data it indicates the urgent need for more research on this issue as well as the possibility to have a win-win situation in which both creators and the public get a better deal via a change to alternative compensation system such as a levy.
La défaite des américains en Afghanistan.
Reports emerged in the Pakistani media at the weekend that the US had contacted the Taliban leadership with the aim of establishing a truce in Afghanistan. The reported linkman is a Pakistani, Javed Ibrahim Paracha, but he has denied the story, saying he had never met any US officials, only US businessmen.
There is more to this story, though, according to information acquired by Asia Times Online.
In fact, the latest peace initiative was started a few months ago when the US realized, finally, that it simply was not making significant progress in stabilizing Afghanistan, despite the relatively successful conclusion of presidential and parliamentary elections.
Sony DRM (suite)
Now analyst house Gartner has discovered that the technology can be easily defeated simply by applying a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc. This renders session two — which contains the self-loading DRM software — unreadable.
"The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD 'rip' programs continue to work as usual. Moreover, even without the tape, common CD-copying programs readily duplicate the copy-protected disc in its entirety," Gartner (which is at pains to say it doesn't endorse the use of rip technology) explains.
2.50$ US par chanson
Un merveilleux prix qui va, bien sûr, contribuer à renflouer les coffres de l'industrie du disque.
These partners in high prices already charge $2.50 for a small clip of a song to be used as a ringtone; so on some level, charging $2.50 for a whole song must seem like a bargain to them. But ringtones require editing, at least, and sometimes must be matched to a particular phone. With full-song downloads, Sprint is entering an established, competitive market where the price has been 99 cents. I could swallow a small convenience surcharge of, maybe, 25 cents, but not a 150% markup.
The high costs don't stop there. The new music store can be accessed -- so far -- on only two new high-end phones, from Sanyo and Samsung, which cost more than $200, even after rebates. Even then, if you want to store more than about 32 songs on your phone, you'll have to spring for a larger memory card, which costs anywhere from $25 to $100. You have to pay at least $15 a month for a data plan that allows you just to access the music store, though you also get other services.
For that kind of money, you'd better really, really, really want to download that new Kenny Chesney song, RIGHT NOW, before you can get to a computer.
Not only that, but the Sprint store imposes more limitations on the use of the songs than Apple does. You can play downloaded songs on only one phone, and the song files can't be played back on a PC. To play them on a PC, you have to download them again, on the computer, in a different format, though you don't get charged again for this.
The computer version of the songs can be played only on three PCs (Windows only), and three portable players, but not the most popular and best player, the iPod. Songs bought from Apple can be played on up to five computers and on an unlimited number of iPods.
Oh, and did I mention that Sprint offers only 250,000 songs, for now, compared with Apple's selection of two million tracks?
18.11.05
GM cuts
Not only is the company seeking to cut two-thirds of its 34,000 hourly workers in the United States, it wants to cut wages to as little as $10 an hour from as much as $30.
I got an idea: make bigger SUVs. Like this.
Krugman sur les soins de santé privés
Un autre dans la série. Extrait:
The theory was that the private sector would find innovative ways to lower costs while providing better care.
The theory was wr