“future” cops
via Matt Novak
from the comments
The fish lawyers can fuck themselves.
tweet of the day, II
Thankfully You Can’t Copyright An Idea™
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) January 18, 2012
Censoring Wired
Wired has a good overview, explaining their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act:
Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked.
Such requests would need to be reviewed and approved by a judge. But accused sites would get little notice of a pending action in U.S. courts against them, and, once blacklisted, have little effective means of appeal.
As you probably know, sites like Wikipedia, Wired, and BoingBoing are going black today, or censoring their content in protest, but for those in need @FakeWikipedia is going strong on Twitter.
Update: If you would like to register your discontent, Google can point you in the right direction, or simply call your representatives.
Cooking Up Change
They looked so young, the four college students who sat down and ordered coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960.
Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn’t sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.
Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn’t get their coffee.
But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.
It wasn’t the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement.
Ask a law librarian
Fuck it. I’m back.
Big black woman with enormous braless bust: “I woanna commit my daughter, she crazy. They tole me I could come up here an’ git the forms.”
[She lifts her udders and lays them on the counter. The two librarians are speechless.]
Busty: “Cuz she tryin’ t’ break me an’ my Messkin boyfriend UP.”
Librarian [to man nearby]: “May I help you?”
Hispanic man: “No, I with she.”
Busty: “Yeah, she tryin’ t’ break us up. But he would work five jobs if he gotta, an’ no black man doan woanna work one.”
[It should be noted that both librarians are black and male.]
Librarian: “You gotta go to the Mental Illness Court across the street in the Records Building.”
Busty: “Come oan, Wahn, les go.”
headline of the day
2 women share 1st kiss at US Navy ship’s return
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
headline of the day
headline of the day, II
Trent Arsenault, Sperm Donor, Gets Cease Order From The FDA
headline of the day, III
Woman sues dealer, alleges dead-body odor in SUV
headline of the day
Miami’s Federal Prison Plagued By Strippers Posing As ‘Legal Assistants’
Wanted: Personal Photo of Kate Mulgrew
Posted to Dubuque Freecycle list:
We are trying to find a photo that someone took with a personal camera of Kate Mulgrew that would be appropriate to have it transferred to a birthday cake for a HUGE FAN of hers….Since Kate is from this area, thought it might be possible…. If you have a photo of Kate that I could borrow we would be so grateful! I would take it, get it copied and returned to you in an hour! I would need it today however…I know short notice…but I didn’t realize copyright laws on cake would be a problem. silly me.
Thanks!!!!
tweet of the day
headline of the day, III
Italian man gets $44,500 parking ticket that dates to 208 AD
headline of the day
Today Is the Last Day to Have Sex with an Animal in Florida—Legally
Most damaging, however, was her obstinate faith in the kindness of strangers
A good overview of the Amanda Knox case, at least from what has become the American perspective:
Their list of grievances was long: incompetent police work, leading to the mishandling of evidence. The lack of any physical trace of Knox in Kercher’s bedroom. Italy’s carnivalesque judicial process, where there is never order in the court, the lawyers and defendants constantly interrupting the proceedings with groans and catcalls and wild gesticulations, while the press in the gallery yammers away like the kids in the back of the classroom. The prosecution’s failure to establish motive or intent (“We live in an age of violence with no motive,” said one prosecutor). And the fact that prosecutors did not immediately drop the case against Knox and Sollecito after the bloody fingerprints and footprints came back matching a 20-year-old petty thief named Rudy Guede.
(via marginal revolution)
We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight
Six former corrections officials wrote Georgia Corrections Officials and Governor Nathan Deal asking that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles reconsider the execution of Troy Davis:
We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.
As of now, the execution has been postponed pending review from the Supreme Court.
Update: The Supreme Court Rejects the stay of execution.
(thanks, Tim)
headline of the day
Chinese female condoms too small for South Africans
Unlike Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Minority Report” or the film inspired by the novel, the program relies on algorithms, and not mutants to predict the likelihood of something happening
The police department in Santa Cruz has employed predictive algorithms to reduce burglaries and car break-ins.
The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.
In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.
The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.
Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
Know Your Rights: Photographers
The ACLU has put together a guide of your current rights as a photographer. I say current, because some of the concepts are in flux, and some states have odd differentiations between photography and videography (in the latter, regulating the audio portion under statutes for wiretapping).
Previously, on clusterflock: It feels like someone posted something on photographers’ rights, or lack there of, recently. If that rings a bell, let me know in comments, and I’ll make the link.
coming out of sleep
Arrested for farting.
tweet of the day
