Even though the training in ethics takes many forms, the ethics of abandoning the ten non-virtues is their basis. Of the ten non-virtues, three pertain to bodily actions, four to verbal actions, and three to mental actions.

The three mental non-virtues are:

1. Covetousness: thinking, "May this become mine," desiring something that belongs to another.
2. Harmful intent: wishing to injure others, be it great or small injury.
3. Wrong view: viewing some existent thing, such as rebirth, cause and effect, or the Three Jewels*, as non-existent.

The opposite of these ten non-virtues are the ten virtues, and engaging in them is called the practice of ethics.

*The core of Buddhism: Buddha, his doctrine (Dharma), and the Spiritual Community.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Immune Systems Increasingly On Attack - Washington Post

First, asthma cases shot up, along with hay fever and other common allergic reactions, such as eczema. Then, pediatricians started seeing more children with food allergies. Now, experts are increasingly convinced that a suspected jump in lupus, multiple sclerosis and other afflictions caused by misfiring immune systems is real.

Gary Gygax, 1938-2008: Rest in peace, Dungeon Master - Crave

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the fathers of tabletop role-playing games, died on Tuesday at the age of 69. He had suffered from heart problems.

Windows-based cash machines 'easily hacked' - ZDNet

Security experts have hacked ATMs to show how easy it is to steal money and bank account details from modern cash machines. ATMs, or automated teller machines, today face the Internet-born threat of worms and denial-of-service attacks, as well as being at risk from malicious applications that can harvest customer data or hijack machines.

Why spam isn't going away soon (Hint: Blame the Storm worm) - C|Net

Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 State of Spam report that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam; they also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That's a change from previous reports that had suggested servers in North America were responsible. What the Symantec report doesn't explicitly state is that much of the European spam doesn't come from individuals sitting at their desks pumping out lists. Europe is one of the hotbeds for the Storm worm botnet, notorious for automatically co-opting its victims into spam relays.

 
Stuart Carlson - 04 March 2008

What piracy crisis? MPAA touts record box office for 2007 - Ars Technica

... But this sort of thing has become crucial to the MPAA. Take a look at the group's homepage; nearly everything is about copyrights and piracy. The MPAA routinely asserts that the movie business is being decimated by piracy, but the press release announcing the Weekly Reader deal sits just below a far more interesting piece of news (PDF): data that shows the US box office doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over 2006 and bringing in $9.63 billion.

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Comcast Must Die - MojoBlog

Comcast, the cable TV giant, has given its customers lots of reasons to hate the company. They've refused to embrace a la carte programming, charged people $2 to stop sending them junk mail, wrecked people's credit reports, falsely advertised its Internet speed and generally abused the people who pay for its services. Comcast's customer service problems are so acute that Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield started a blog called Comcast Must Die to compile all the gripes about the company from consumers. But Comcast doesn't really need any help generating bad press.

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AT&T's degrading service and my landlord’s ban on Comcast - ZDNet

With all the negative attention headed towards Comcast lately, AT&T's problems seem to be slipping below the radar. Unfortunately for me, those problems are first hand for me as I'm personally suffering degradations in speed. As if getting 1200 Kbps downstream on a so-called 1500 Mbps service and all those outage problems (example here and here) weren't bad enough, my AT&T DSL service has declined. I suppose I could count myself lucky compared to my Mom's neighbor who only got 320 Kbps service after AT&T unilaterally and without permission "upgraded" his bill to the 1500 Mbps service without upgrading his performance.

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Great news for Microsoft: Zunes stolen! - ZDNet

Providing yet another sign that Apple's iPod is the audio and video platform, a policy think-tank on Tuesday said that thefts of the media player have skewed crime statistics. Microsoft wishes it had that publicity.

more ...

The Gaza Bombshell - Vanity Fair

After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

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Could a Coffee Maker Be Worth $11,000? - Slate

The New York Times used words like "cult object," "majestic," and "titillating"; the Economist called it "ingenious" and "sleek." The subject of these encomiums is, incongruously, a commercial coffee machine—the Clover 1s, an $11,000 device that brews regular coffee (not espresso) one cup at a time. Could the Clover represent that much of an advance in the state of the coffee art? I had to try it for myself.

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Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals - Wired

In the end, it turns out it's all about the emails.

The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

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FISA and Total Online Awareness - MojoBlog

New questions have arisen about what, exactly, the government hopes to surveil.

... And indeed, that would seem to be a big problem. Back in August 2007, an extremely large, bipartisan majority in Washington sought to make an extremely small, technical change to FISA to account for the fact that the NSA can't know, a priori, where the recipient of a call will be located: Under the theoretical terms of the agreement, the NSA would be allowed to listen to calls of foreign origin making their way through a U.S. switch. If the recipient happened to be in a foreign country, surveillance could continue unmolested. If the recipient happened to be located in the U.S., then the NSA could either continue surveillance with a warrant, or minimize the data.

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Linux "The Super Villan"

http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54

Still lol just thinking about it.

"Switch to... uh... what ever the hell you want"

Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier - Wired

Quantico A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

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Free WiFi comes at a price in Denver International Airport - Ars Technica

The limitations of web filtering software have been extensively documented; most software arbitrarily excludes sites with educational or other sophisticated content, while clearly pornographic material sporadically slips through. Oddly, the limitations haven't stopped organizations or, in the case of Australia, an entire government from attempting to deploy them. The international airport in Denver recently took the plunge and started using filtering software when they converted their WiFi network to free access. The results are an excellent illustration of what leads an organization to choose a solution that's annoying, arbitrary, and ineffective.

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More FBI privacy violations confirmed - Associated Press

The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.

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KY Rep. Seeks To Ban Anonymous Blogging - WebProNews

... Kentucky state representative Tim Couch (R-Hyden), introduced a bill to the General Assembly that would bar Kentuckians from anonymously commenting on Websites, or via their own blogs. The bill would require anyone leaving a comment to provide their real name, address, and email address to the website on which they wish to comment. Website operators would be required to enforce this policy or face fines.

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Bugs Bunny vs. Daffy Duck: Why voters always choose the wascally wabbit for president - Slate

How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?
... And here's another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.

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What color do Smurfs turn when you choke them?

Google, sticking it to the little guy!

OK, I admit, I'm a bit bitter right now.

For three years or so I have had Google Adsense advertising on my website. The monthly income has varied based on the amount of traffic I receive and could vary from nothing to $15-$20 a month. This is mainly based on the fact that most of my traffic comes from netizens looking for circumventor links. The hits climb in the winter and fall in the summer, when schools of all sorts are in session.

This past month I finally pushed my all time income over $100 so I was entitled to a pay out. This would have been my first pay out ever! After three years I finally made $100 total!

But, Noooo !!!!

Google goes and suspends my account for illegal clicks! In essence they say I have been clicking advertising links on my own site or having someone do it for me to up my payout.

Hey Google, don't you think if I wanted to cheat I would have started a little earlier? Are you that stupid?

So I figure, if the drugs you are taking in Mountain View that good you really need to start share them with the rest of us. Or maybe you could check into one of those fancy "health spas" you have out there in California and come back to reality.

Jackasses !!!

Check out this post on Craigslist - a Toshiba 600MHz laptop with 64MB of memory and a 6GB harddrive for only $240 !!!!

Oh... and it's "INTERNET READY" with a 56K modem.

Better jump on this deal!  

How to Date the Grand Canyon: Go With the Flow - Wired

Geologists maintain that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon's walls very gradually over a long period of time, and they have found new evidence to nail down exactly how long.

... Its banded walls make up one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth. And yet it seems the only time reporters bother to mention its geology is when they are writing about creationists and their bogus claims that the Grand Canyon formed a few thousand years ago. It's a shame, because the real story of the Grand Canyon is a riveting epic. Even its scientific history is fascinating: Figuring out just how old the Grand Canyon is has challenged geologists for 150 years. And just this week, the mystery may be solved.

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Torrent roars at Grand Canyon: Outcome of Glen Canyon release won't surface for several weeks - Rocky Mountain News

Martha Hahn is clutching the front of a motorized raft Wednesday afternoon as it strains against surging currents on the Colorado River.

Hahn is chief of science at Grand Canyon National Park, and she's onboard to observe how the river is responding to the mighty torrent of water being turned loose from the Glen Canyon Dam.

The release is an attempt to re-create the roaring springtime flows that shaped the river before the dam was built in the 1960s.

more ...

A slide show from the Denver Post

A NBC Nightly News report on the 60 hour flow.

Even as a great rock is not shaken by the wind, the wise man is not shaken by praise or blame.

Buddha

US seizes domain name of Spanish company selling Cuba trips - Ars Technica

The United States has often presented itself as the guardian of Internet free speech. China may censor the Internet, and otherwise-civilized nations such as Germany or France may attempt to block what they view as unacceptable material, but the United States of America likes to think of itself as a place that doesn't censor people online... unless you happen to own a foreign travel business that offers trips to Cuba. Under such circumstances, as Steve Marshall discovered, all bets are off.

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Google pulls some map images at Pentagon's request - Reuters

Google Inc has complied with a request by the Pentagon to remove some online images from its street-level map service because they pose a security threat to U.S. military bases, military and company officials said on Thursday.

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It took me some time, but I finally found a way to change the bitrate when ripping cds to ogg lossy. Mine had been 160 kbps and I wanted to up it to 256 kbps. If you want to change yours, this is what you do.

1. Go to Preferences in either Sound Juicer or Rhythmbox (I don't know about any other audio players) and select "Edit Profiles".

2. Select the Lossy and click "Edit".

3. In the Gstreamer Pipeline box is code that looks like this:
    audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.8 ! oggmux

4. What you want to edit is the "quality=" number.

Here is the quality number and its approximate bitrate:

• q .1 = 80 kbps
• q .2 = 96 kbps
• q .3 = 112 kbps
• q .4 = 128 kbps
• q .5 = 160 kbps
• q .6 = 192 kbps
• q .7 = 224 kbps
• q .8 = 256 kbps
• q .9 = 320 kbps
• q 1.0 = 499 kbps

5. When you are done, click "Close" and your bitrate has been changed.

Bad Phorm? UK ISPs to sell clickstream data to advertisers - Ars Technica

Deep packet inspection gear has long had the ability to peer inside users' datastreams to pull out all sorts of interesting information, but a UK company called Phorm is taking DPI to the next level by using it to sell ads. The company's ambitious goal: segment users into small and highly-accurate "channels" by reading the URLs they visit, the search terms they use, and the content of the pages they visit. The resulting channels are then sold to advertisers who are salivating at the thought of better targeting. Actual users are predictably less thrilled, however, and a row over the issue has erupted in Britain.

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AP probe finds drugs in drinking water - Associated Press

A vast array of pharmaceuticals - including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

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Ben Sargent - 10 March 2008

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data - Wall Street Journal

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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~

EMI to slash antipiracy funding, but will stick with IFPI - Ars Technica

After spending a few months on the fence and even threatening to leave the group, major record label EMI has decided to stick with the IFPI and will continue contributing to the group's operations. The support comes at a price for the IFPI, however, as EMI and the other labels will slash their funding for the industry group's antipiracy effort.

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~

A Space Robot With Arms to Make R2D2 Jealous - New York Times

Anyone who has followed science fiction knows that a good long-duration spacecraft has to have a robot. The space shuttle Endeavour takes off for the space station on Tuesday with a large, Canadian-made robot named Dextre in its cargo bay. Endeavour’s seven-member crew will assemble the robot during three of the mission’s five scheduled spacewalks.

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RifleGear.com

Looking for that over the top Hello Kitty item for your daughter? Well, Crave found this beauty on RifleGear.com.

Hey, maybe if Charlton Heston has a grand-daughter, he can pick one up for her.

Genuine compassion is unbiased.

- His Holiness the Dalai Lama

 
Dana Summers - 10 March 2008

 
Stuart Carlson - 10 March 2008

House to close its doors for spying bill - AP

House doors were locked Thursday night as lawmakers prepared for their first closed session in 25 years to debate surveillance legislation.
Republicans requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping bill that is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.

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Inspector general: FBI not embracing privacy safeguards - C|Net

The FBI has wielded the Patriot Act's extraordinary surveillance powers to unlawfully collect information about American citizens and has resisted some efforts to impose additional privacy safeguards, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general.

more ...

 
Dick Locher - 12 March 2008

TrueCrypt 5.0: Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Encryption

I have recently installed TrueCrypt 5.0 and I'm loving it. I used TrueCrypt for years when I was running XP, but, until recently, I haven't since switching to Ubuntu. At first, it was only accessable via the terminal and I just couldn't get it to work for me(ie, figured out). A couple months ago I found EasyCrypt which is a GUI front end for TrueCrypt and started using that. Now, with the introduction of version 5.0, TrueCrypt has a graphical user interface for Linux (along with a Mac OS X version) and it no longer requires EasyCrypt for a GUI.

TrueCrypt main features are:

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
• Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.
• Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
• Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
• Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
1. Hidden volume (steganography – more information may be found here).
2. No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).
• Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish. Mode of operation: XTS.

I suggest it for all you sensitive data.

FCC living in the dark ages; a threat to net neutrality aims - Ars Technica

The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with 83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006. "Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P application users and other consumers know that the agency will take their comments seriously?

 
Chip Bok - 11 March 2008

 
Gary Varvel - 13 March 2008

 
Glenn McCoy - 13 March 2008

 
Jack Ohman - 11 March 2008

 
Steve Benson - 13 March 2008

 
Stuart Carlson - 13 March 2008

I was sad to read upon my arriving home from work today that Arthur C. Clark (1917-2008) passed away this morning. I am not going to try to put into words what many others have already done, much more eloquently.

Childhood's end: Arthur C. Clarke passes away at age 90 - Ars Techinica

Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90 - NY Times

The last rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke - Salon

A global figure, Arthur C Clarke never lost his sense of wonder - Times

Video: Arthur C. Clarke's Last Message to Earth - Wired

 
Ann Telnaes - 19 March 2008

 
Jeff Dinziger - 21 march 2008

 
Tom Toles - 23 March 2008

Rick Rolled to child porn = you're a pedophile, says FBI - Ars Technica

Everyone has had it happen to them: a "friend" sends you a link in IM or over IRC that purports to be something like a cat in an awkward position with a hilarious caption. Soon, however, you discover that the link wasn't to a lolcat at all; instead, you've been Rick Rolled—or even worse, sent to 2girls1cup (find it on your own, but be warned: it may scar you for life). These pranks are commonplace now, but be careful of what you click on and from whom. If that link points to anything even pretending to be child porn, that's enough evidence for the FBI of intent to download it. The authorities could then raid your home and possibly throw you in jail.

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Bob Gorrell - 24 March 2008

 
Don Wright - 20 March 2008

 
Dwane Powell - 21 March 2008

Bennett at Peacefire.org has passed along these Circumventors recently:

http://www.strongbug.com/
http://www.rhymingmonster.com/
http://www.gravityglove.com/

Remember, always try https://www.stupidcensorship.com first.

The big list.

Bennett also passes on this info on using Facebook:

A note about using these sites with Facebook: the first time you attempt to sign in to Facebook using one of these Circumventors, you get taken to a page that says "never enter your Facebook password on sites not located on Facebook.com". But then on THAT page, if you enter your e-mail address and password AGAIN, for some reason that time it logs you in successfully.

Bennett at Peacefire.org has passed along these Circumventors recently:

http://www.tiretrash.com/

Remember, always try https://www.stupidcensorship.com first.

The big list.

 
Ann Telnaes - 27 March 2008

 
Bob Gorrell - 26 March 2008

 
Drew Sheneman - 27 March 2008

 
John Deering - 26 March 2008

 
29 March 2008

 
Tom Toles - 26 March 2008