Author: RagManX

Another Filipino prisoner dance performance

A little less synced with the song and video than last time around, but I guess there wasn’t a video of hundreds dancing in sync to Hammer’s music.

They sure can dance and handle large-scale choreography, can’t they?  But they need baggier pants to reallllly fully pull off that song.

[tags]Filipino prisoners, Dance, Hammer, Can’t touch this, Hammer don’t hurt ’em[/tags]

First amendment is not protection for some forms of being an ass-hat

In a close vote, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled today that 1st amendment free speech protection doesn’t protect forging email headers for spamming purposes. This means convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes still has to serve his sentence for such practices.

As a result of the 4-to-3 vote, Jaynes will serve nine years in prison for sending millions of illegal spam messages in 2003, absent an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Spamming itself is not illegal. It is allowed under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. However, the law prohibits the use of false or misleading message headers and deceptive subject lines. It requires a way to opt-out, a valid postal address, and that the message is identified as an advertisement.

This is an issue that we’ll probably hearing more about in the near future, as another well-known spammer, Robert Soloway, is headed to court soon to face his own charges for mail abuse and using so-called botnets to send millions of spam emails.

Soloway was arrested in May and charged with sending out tens of millions of unsolicited messages; so many, in fact, that investigators called him the “Spam King,” and his arrest was hailed as a major blow in the fight against spam. Many of Soloway’s unsolicited messages were sent out using hacked “zombie” computers infected with botnet software, prosecutors allege.

The United States Attorney’s Office is seeking more than $770,000 in fines, but Soloway is also facing fraud and identity theft charges that could result in jail time.

Of course, even with this two heavy-hitters out, we’re still seeing far too much email spam. But hopefully these and similar cases will help pare that down eventually.

If criminal prosecutions like Soloway’s are deterring spammers, you wouldn’t know if from looking at your inbox. Security vendor IronPort said that spam volume on the Internet was up 100 percent in 2007, jumping to 120 billion unwanted messages per day.

So we still have a ways to go.

[tags]Spam, spamming, spammers, email, Robert Soloway, Jeremy Jaynes[/tags]

Earthquake *NOT* caused by global warming?

For a change, global warming is not the root cause of some serious act-of-god type happenings. In this instance, those damns gays are causing earthquakes.

An Israeli parliamentarian said that several earthquakes felt in Israel recently were a consequence of gays and the parliament’s acceptance of them.

. . .

“Why do earthquakes happen? One of the reasons is the things to which the Knesset (parliament) gives legitimacy, to sodomy,” Benizri said during a parliamentary debate on earthquake preparedness.

A cost-effective way of averting earthquake damage, he added, would be to stop “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.

So there’s the little bonus throw-in that it isn’t just the gays, but the acceptance and apparent promotion of their lifestyle by the Parliament that has caused the recent quakes. It’s encouraging to see that closed-minded thinking is prevalent in more places than just the US.

[tags]Gays, earthquakes, sodomy[/tags]

Pizza pricing

080228_pizza_chart.gifHere’s a facet of your life you probably don’t give much thought to – pizza prices. You call up the local pizza joint, order your $15 pizza, and soon you are eating a tasty treat made to your specifications (or at least, close to what you wanted), right? Well, cheese prices are up, and now with a rise in wheat prices, there’s a good chance that pizza you depend on (well, in my house we depend on it once every 7-10 days at a minimum) will soon go up in price, too.

Players big, small and in between in the $30 billion-plus industry are feeling the heat as they figure out how to deal with the double-barrel price spikes of the gooey and grainy commodities without sacrificing their quality, competitive edge or customer loyalty.

Now to us non-pizza-making peons, it might be hard to imagine how this could have such a big impact on pizza pricing. I mean, absolutely everything is going up in price right now, isn’t it? Massive fuel cost increases over the past half decade seem to have made everything more expensive. So how big a deal can a little bump in wheat prices be?

Spring wheat for March delivery fell $1.75 Thursday to close at $18.25 a bushel on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. It traded as high as $25 a bushel this week. Wheat historically trades at $3 to $7 a bushel.

Holy Lolita-smacking beat-down. That’s a lotta price jumping, isn’t it? So, how to cope? Continue reading “Pizza pricing”

Typing tracker

Think you can type fast, hot shot? Put your skillz (you know we’re serious, because of the ‘Z’ we use) to the test with the USB typing speed tachometer.

typer-tach_clip.jpg

Sure, the seller calls it a USB WPM speedometer, but we’re a bit more advanced here — we know it’s a tachometer of a sort. (via boingboing gadgets)

[tags]USB, WPM, Typing, Tachometer, Speed meter[/tags]

Ricin inside

It isn’t such a great time to be a guest at a slightly-off-the-strip hotel in Vegas right now, is it?

A substance found at a motel may be the deadly toxin ricin, but authorities said Friday they don’t believe it was intended for a terrorist attack. Lab tests on the substance were pending and seven people were taken to hospitals as a precaution.

“This event does not appear to be terrorism related,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington said Friday morning. Kolko said the FBI was assisting local police in the investigation.

That aside, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are still involved in investigating the find.  But really, that makes sense for this oddity – I just find it humorous that it’s already being said that authorities don’t believe it is related to terrorism, but the DHS is involved in investigating it.

And if you aren’t familiar with just why a box of ricin is a big deal:

Ricin is made from the waste left over from processing castor beans, and can be extremely lethal. As little as 500 micrograms, or about the size of the head of a pin, can kill a human, according to the CDC.

Nasty stuff.  Quick, deadly in small quantities, and I’m guessing easy to keep out of sight.

[tags]Ricin, Las Vegas, FBI, DHS[/tags]