One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Tuesday, 18 May 2004

.< 11:37:32 PM >
MSNBC - The Roots of Torture
But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers[~]and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places.

.< 11:23:42 PM >
How high does it go?

The more we find out about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the less it looks like a case of renegade soldiers. [Salon]

< 11:11:43 PM >

The officer who was in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib said intelligence officers sometimes told military police to force detainees to strip naked. [New York Times: International]

< 11:08:00 PM >

Reuters news agency says three of its local staff were abused, as the first US soldier prepares for a court martial. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

< 11:00:30 PM >

India's Congress party scrambles to find a prime minister, after Sonia Gandhi's shock decision to bow out. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

< 10:53:43 PM >

The government proposed to allow women to obtain the so-called morning after birth-control pill without a prescription at any pharmacy in Canada. [New York Times: International] 'The move comes only weeks after the acting director of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States refused to allow the morning after pill to be sold without a prescription.

The latest divergence in American and Canadian social policy - the two governments have also gone in different directions on drug enforcement and same-sex marriages - is likely to result in many American women crossing the border to obtain the pills.'

< 9:51:35 PM >

Abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq shock the world and roil the Bush Administration. The inside story of what went wrong--and who's to blame [TIME's Top World Stories]

< 7:49:36 PM >

STE. HELENE-DE-CHESTER, QUEBEC -- An enormous long-haired dog is sleepily guarding the barn at La Moutonniere, a cheesemaking operation in this central Quebec hill town. Inside the barn, it's feeding time. Sheep are jostling and bleating as they wait their turn. Farmer Alastair MacKenzie opens the stall gate, and a dozen sheep at a time take their place at a ... [Boston Globe -- Living / Arts News]

< 7:45:09 PM >

"Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's most disciplined and powerful movie to date, suggests that he is also, arguably, a great filmmaker. [New York Times: Arts] 'The audience at the afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation that the festival's artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, said was the longest he had ever witnessed in Cannes. [snip] It is also the best film Mr. Moore has made so far, a powerful and passionate expression of outraged patriotism, leavened with humor and freighted with sorrow.'

< 7:39:52 PM >

India's governing party waged the country's first modern electoral campaign, but it was ousted in what has been called "a huge popular rebellion." [New York Times: Technology] 'They boasted of sending four million e-mail messages to voters and transmitting an automated voice greeting from the popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to 10 million land and mobile phones

But the hype over the high-tech campaign obscured these statistics: In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India's 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 a day, only an estimated 659,000 households have computers.

The message that the Hindu-nationalist-led government had delivered the country to a new era of prosperity was belied by the limited reach of the media to deliver it.'

< 7:33:58 PM >

Semacode, a free system released this month, lets users scan bar codes on everyday objects with their camera phones and instantly pull up all sorts of information about them. It's an information bridge between the world and the Web. By Chris Ulbrich. [Wired News] 'Canadian programmer Simon Woodside, the creator of Semacode, had been tinkering with modified CueCats when he started to consider the possibilities of using camera phones as bar-code readers instead. Market penetration would take care of itself, he reasoned. Equipped with the proper software, the camera phone would make a dandy URL bar-code reader.'

I've always hated the idea of the camera phone (if it's worth taking a picture of it's worth using decent quality gear). But this application has a certain geek appeal.

< 7:29:46 PM >

Apple Computer plans to continue rapidly bringing out new versions of the operating system, but it won't continue at quite the pace it's maintained in recent years. [CNET News.com]

< 6:26:42 PM >

72s2CD.com is an online retailer that sells public-domain 78RPM albums (lots of Gilbert and Sullivan and Alma Gluck!) that have been converted to audio CDs.

Link [Boing Boing]

< 6:22:26 PM >

Goldberg2 from Re: Bach - Single
Lara St. John [iTunes 10 New Releases]

Yikes!

< 6:16:05 PM >

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3[product] years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.

.< 6:12:01 PM >
Time Magazine has RSS . We have...

Time Magazine has RSS. We have Bing! [Scripting News]

< 6:05:25 PM >

A hint of things to come -- Web browser from Opera Software incorporates RSS. [Yahoo! News - Technology] [Scott Young's Radio Weblog]

This makes a lot of sense.

< 5:56:48 PM >

The Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers (P&E) Wing has chosen Nashville, TN to kick off its Grammy Surround Music Alliance Premiere on May 19, 2004. The Grammy Surround Music Alliance is an unprecedented summit of surround sound's major manufacturers in conjunction with the Recording Academy, whose goal is to help increase awareness and promote the musical experience of 5.1 surround sound. [ProSound News]

< 3:34:48 PM >

I have an M-Audio Transit USB sound card. This is good card; the sound is very decent and price is very good, too ($70). And M-Audio claims full support for Mac OS X. Also, there are some raving reviews around and so on, ... [macosxhints]

< 12:37:58 PM >

The script below attempts to automatically query the allmusic.com website to find Tones (see robg's note below) associated with an iTunes track. The Tones are then added to the comments field of the track. [macosxhints]

< 12:31:24 PM >

Hurray. Someone in the popular press actually mentioned sound quality! Thanks Andy.

< 12:20:47 PM >

Sony Electronics on Monday unveiled its new ProDATA optical drives, which let users burn up to 23GB of data onto a single-sided optical disc using a blue laser-equipped drive. The drives, which will ship in June, can transfer data at up to 9MB/sec write speed and 11MB/sec read speed. Aimed at the professional storage and archive market, the new ProDATA drives are available in an internal SCSI configuration for $2,995, or either an external SCSI or USB 2.0 configuration for $3,299. The drives ship with Software Architect's Disk Drive TuneUp for Mac and Windows. Discs cost $45 each, in either write-once or rewriteable versions. [MacCentral]

< 12:08:05 PM >

Apple's iTunes Music Store was nominated for three Webby Awards this year and brought home honors in two of those categories. Apple was nominated in the Commerce, Music and Services categories, winning the Commerce and Music awards, but were beaten out by Google for the Services entry. [MacCentral]

< 1:28:37 AM >

Powell noted that he was "comfortable at the time that I made the presentation it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community." In other words, the CIA was scammed by Chalabi's outfit, and it never caught on. So who's been fired over this? After all, the nation supposedly went to war partly due to this intelligence. And partly because of this bad information over 700 Americans and countless Iraqis have lost their lives. Shouldn't someone be held accountable?

.< 1:10:10 AM >
The Nation : "Powell acknowledged that he...

The Nation: "Powell acknowledged that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war." [Scripting News]

< 12:43:01 AM >

Colin Powell appeared on Meet the Press this weekend, and his appearance was marred by his press secretary moving the camera and attempting to end the interview early when Russert, the interviewer, started to ask a hardball question about the fictional Nigerien yellow-cake uranium that Powell used as an excuse to go to war in Iraq.

Most noteworthy about this event was that Powell, rebuked the press-secretary on air, demanded that the camera be trained on him again, and then answered the question, describing the intelligence he'd received as "deliberately misleading."

Lisa Rein's got the video up -- highly recommended.

Link [Boing Boing]

I've downloaded the video. Pretty extraodrinary. Powell may come out of this whole mess looking good after all.