The following poem, "Risks" -- printed in English and signed "anonymous" -- was found in Duraid's personal car in Baghdad. The nature of the poem is similar to other material on his short-lived blog. It is presumed that Duraid did not author the poem, but that the handwriting was his (a quick Google search turns up the same poem on various "inspirational quotes" webpages throughout the 'Net).

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd Is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is To risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing dies nothing, Has nothing and is nothing.
They say they avoid suffering and sorrow, But they cannot learn, Feel, change, grow, love, feel.
Chained by their attitudes, they are slaves.
They have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
-- Anonymous

Duraid's blog mentions that its author was in Iraq, "working as a journalist for a large corporation", permitted to travel with the military, and having been a DJ in Baghdad before the war. This link to a related CNN story mentions also that he was a DJ before the war. The BoingBoing reader provides further information (and asks that the information not be repeated here) which leads me to believe that the blog is in fact Duraid's.

After exploring Orkut for about a week, sniffing around, and learning more about the turn-ons and sexual habits of various remote professional acquaintances than I ever in a million years wanted to know, I decided I'd like to delete my account. But unllike other popular FOAFs like Friendster, the app UI does not allow you to delete your account. I noodled through the help contents for a bit, and learned that the only way to resign from the realm of orkut is to email a request to admin@orkut.com with your first and last name. I did so eight hours ago and haven't seen a reply; not holding my breath for one, given the fact that Orkut is likely a small, overwhelmed operation with zero admin resources.

I realize the site is still in a very early state. But come ON. I've worked on large-scale public web projects before, and no matter what label you use to excuse the incomplete nature of a service -- alpha, beta, whateva-- not allowing users to opt out of participation as easily as they initiated it in the first place just seems irresponsible. If it's not ready for the public, don't release it to the public. Orkut's Roach Motel syndrome, combined with the onerous TOS terms danah and others have pointed out, leave me feeling kind of icky where this particular FOAF is concerned.

Many of the women killed in Ciudad Juarez - across the border from the US city of El Paso in Texas - over the past 10 years were factory workers snatched while travelling to and from their jobs.

Most had been brutally sexually assaulted and tortured before their deaths.

There have been several arrests - but most cases were allegedly based on forced confessions and only one man has been convicted, for one of the killings.

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Update: The V-Day organization is planning a memorial march on Juarez for Valentine's Day -- just a short hop from San Diego if you're coming down for ETCON

i've long wanted to be able to search my friend's brains, which is the kind of social networking that matters. there's no technical reason i can't, just no one has built me the app. i still haven't figured out the solution to the socially awkward "actually, you're not my friend, why are you saying you are?" problem, which is why i quit orkut. but maybe you can raise the value of the app so that people will put up with that, and maybe its ok to say "actually i share some pretty intimate stuff, so my circle is kind of tight." as a reply- i don't know. the point is, people will put up with problems in proportion to the value they derive from a system. right now orkut and friendster and the like are mostly fun for people that really enjoy filling out webforms and uploading pictures of themselves. and maybe as dating sites, but as i don't really date i don't know. for useful social networking being in my social network has to mean more than being out of it.

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It's always a joy to watch prissy corporate mail filters twitch their lace curtains and bounce back NTK when they spot a phrase they don't like. This week they refused to deliver NTK because we used the word "dyke". As in Greg Dyke. (Admittedly, the completely justified use of "butt" and "wanker" elsewhere might not have helped our case.)

Not as bad as one UK firm's IT department, which is currently binning any incoming email with "hello" or "Hi" in the subject line. "These are common header descriptions of the e-mails containing the [MyDoom] virus", they say. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest they're also common header descriptions of the e-mails not containing it, too.

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I started playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) at the age of 17 with the very first version that was released to the United States, DDR Version 1.5. The first time I saw the game was at Gameworks arcade in Seattle, where tons of people were crowded around the DDR machine to watch different players dance. At this time, I was a senior in high school and weighed about 235 lbs. Four and a half years later, I now weigh close to 140 lbs and I would've never guessed how much that trip (OR a video game) would affect me with my health/weight, and in growing to be a better, more self-confident person.

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(via Kottke)

"When you buy major label music on iTunes," Wilson explained, "the musician usually gets nothing, because they're in perpetual debt to their label until they sell more than 500,000 CDs. And at best they only get 8-14 cents on a $1.00 song. We want to get some of Pepsi's money going to actual musicians, not just record label CEOs and RIAA lawyers."

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"If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world. (...) [W]ithout their language and its structure, people are rootless. In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If those are lost a huge part of a people's history goes. These stories often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.

"...In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian", and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality". I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar. This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath..."

The following proof-of-concept example wa...

vBulletin may be prone to an HTML injection vulnerability. This issue is exposed through inadequate sanitization ...

A vulnerability has been reported to exist in Novell Groupwise that may allow a remot...

Matsushita Electric Works has launched what they call the world's first intelligent screwdriver. Looking like something that would crop up in Ultraman or Power Rangers, it allows you to record macros--slow start, fast midsection, slow again at the end, for example--and replay them with a single button-push. Record an expert's macro and even the novice screwer will see a dramatic improvement, so they claim. It also has a learning function that allows it to gravitate to the speed range you're using most often.

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(via Gizmodo)

A periodic table of condiments that sometimes go bad.

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(via Pirotcar)

Some of the hacks are just for entertainment, like turning a standard Apple mouse into a glowing UFO mouse or modifying a PlayStation 2 so that you can use it to program your own games.

Others are practical, like the chapter on designing and building your own Windows- or Linux-based home theater PC or the ultimate external hard drive to store all those digital images, videos and MP3 files, complete with custom case -- all from stuff you may already have lying around the house. Equally useful are the step-by-step instructions on how to replace a dead iPod battery without having to send the MP3 player back to Apple.

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Sent earlier this week, Google's letter demanded Booble disable their Website and stop using the domain name, "take steps to transfer" the domain to Google, "(i)dentify and agree to transfer to Google any other domain names registered by you that contain the GOOGLE or are confusingly similar to the GOOGLE marks," and "permanently refrain" from using Google's name or any variation on it "that is likely to cause confusion or dilution."

An adult Web portal, YouHo!, uses a parody of one of the earlier Yahoo! homepage styles and layouts, a parody the site continues to use despite Yahoo! undergoing several alterations to its basic homepage look in the past several years.

"We note that you have given interviews to the press in which you state that you intend booble.com to be a parody," said a passage from the Google Trademark Enforcement Team, cited on Booble's Website. "We dispute your assertion that your Website is a parody. For a work to constitute a parody, it must use some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on the original author's works."

Link (Thanks, Susannah!)

WN: What are your biggest challenges right now in sorting out what went wrong with Spirit, and how you're going to fix its tech problems?

Reeves: We have to plan ahead very carefully what we're going to do during each window of opportunity. There are only about three "windows" in each day, and we need to be able to see Earth from Mars. During one window, we're running a script on the vehicle to tell us which piece of software in the system is causing that reset problem. We've tried that for two days, but so far haven't been successful. In another, we're trying to dump parts of the 224-MB flash file system back down to Earth, so we can reconstruct the system here. But think about it -- on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB, so moving the whole file means a lot of days with no additional science. We'd prefer to avoid that path, but it's a contingency plan. In that third window, we try to communicate with the orbiter.

Since we can bring up the system in "cripple mode," we're doing integrity checks manually. But this takes a lot of time, because we like to do them one by one, in order. We can't waste any effort, or time. You could say our dialup service is really, really, really slow.

Troubleshooter: How much is two plus two?
PDC: What is your security clearance, Citizen user?
Troubleshooter: Red, friend PDC!
PDC: Two plus two equals a number between three and six.
Troubleshooter: What?
PDC: You are not cleared for greater precision at this time...

User Desmond-O-NTY-3 is not available. This call has been forwarded to an automated voice system. Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed. To confess to treason, please press 1. To accuse the citizen you are calling of treason, please press 2. To accuse a different citizen of treason, please press 3. To leave voice mail, please press 4. To send a numeric page, please press 5. For more options, please press 6.

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Only one month left to register for ROBOlympics! You've still got two months left to get ready for the event, but only one month to register to compete. This is the first robot event where all major types of robot competitions will be held at the same time. And of course, you can compete in several events - you're not just limited to one. Also: Tickets go on sale Friday (today)!

To celebrate this sponsorship, The Syndicate and Thunderbox are offering a number of special deals for gamers. As gamers, we make sure we have a machine that will let us play the games we want, but we dont always buy the 'cool' addons preferring instead to add more RAM or buy another game. Now you can get alot of those extreme-addons (from PC Skins, to Custom Lighting to a complete Extreme kit) for your PC for free as part of celebrating this groundbreaking event in gaming history. Online Gaming is loaded with guilds many of whom claim to be the best but who are solely focused on themselves. The Syndicate has consistently led the pack in all areas it participates in, paid its dues as a guild, and earned its place as a lead guild in the gaming world. However, during its 8 years of existance, it has maintained its focus on having fun and in making the online community a better place. We hope this sponsorship will be another way we can add value to the gaming community and we look forward to many more years of online gaming with all of you.

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..

TruBlueEnvironment has been reported pro...

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(via iPodHacks)

Last week the Supreme Court let stand the Justice Department's right to secretly arrest noncitizen residents.

Combined with the government's power to designate foreign prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" in order to ignore international treaties regulating their incarceration, and their power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or access to an attorney, the United States is looking more and more like a police state.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department has asked for, and largely received, additional powers that allow it to perform an unprecedented amount of surveillance of American citizens and visitors. The USA Patriot Act, passed in haste after Sept. 11, started the ball rolling.

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1) What the hell is up with the elitist approach to invitation? That's just outright insulting and an attempt to pre-configure the masses through what the technorati are doing. Social networks are not just a product of technologists. Everyone has a social network and what they do with it is quite diverse. To demand that they behave by the norms of technologists is horrifying.

2) Are trustworthy, cool, and sexy the only ways that i might classify my friends? (Even Orkut lists a lot more in his definition of self.) And since when can i rate the people that i know based on this kind of metric?

And goddamnit CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT. Cool as a techy? Cool as a party kid? Trustworthy along what fucking axes?

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An error in the handling of temporary file creation ma...

"We spend millions of dollars annually to build brand awareness and cannot stand idle while Google allows our competitors to ride our coattails," said a statement from Steve Katzman, CEO of American Blind.

So it's really not about consumer protection after all; it's about money. Money that AB&WF spent on silly meatspace advertising while its competitors blew past it by disintermediating physical adspace.

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A worst-case disea...

It has been reported that tcpdump is vulnerable to a denial of service when some packet types are rec...

These "Robot Chick" assemblage sculptures are a little on the NSFW/pr0ny side for my taste, but one or two are quite striking. Wish I have half a grand or so to blow on one!

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(via JWZ)

"We spend millions of dollars annually to build brand awareness and cannot stand idle while Google allows our competitors to ride our coattails," said a statement from Steve Katzman, CEO of American Blind.

So it's really not about consumer protection after all; it's about money. Money that AB&WF spent on silly meatspace advertising while its competitors blew past it by disintermediating physical adspace.

Link

Because the missile was perpetually armed, Williams explained, the circuitry was immersed in liquid Freon to keep it from critically overheating. In the event the missile was launched, the coolant would be abruptly disconnected and the circuitry would have approximately 10 minutes before it burned itself up - just enough time for the missile to reach its target. Freon, it turns out, was an excellent preservative for the colorful (but now ancient) transistors, resistors and capacitors displayed here.

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(Thanks, Hugh!)

A vulnerability has been reported to exist in the software t...