Archive for March, 2009
5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism
Robert Evans: As anyone here at Cracked will tell you, without even the slightest provocation, writing is hard. When the strain of coming up with new material becomes too great to bear, a writer has two options: He can pepper his work with penis jokes and pictures of cute animals, or he can steal his words from a better writer.
Occasionally, a brilliant (or at least sort of clever) mind comes across a bad spell of writer’s block and gives into the temptation to be a cheating plagiarist. Sometimes this blatant plagiarism ends up being the catalyst that launches their career like a rocket powered by lies.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
What’d He Do? We’re not saying that King wasn’t an incredible person who did more to advance the human race than most of us can ever hope to do. We’re just saying that he was also a plagiarizing butthole.
What’s the Problem? For starters,…
Britain Running Out of Cocks And Gaining Wangs
Metro (UK): The number of people in Britain with amusing surnames like Cockshott, Balls, Death and Shufflebottom has declined by up to 75 percent in the last century — as people with silly names either fail to pass them on to the next generation, or leave the country entirely.
A study found the number of people with the name Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881, those called Balls fell to 1,299 from 2,904 and the number of Deaths were reduced to 605 from 1,133.
People named Smellie decreased by 70 percent, Dafts by 51 percent, Gotobeds by 42 percent, Shufflebottoms by 40 percent, and Cockshotts by 34 percent, said Richard Webber, visiting professor of geography at King’s College, London.
Wangs, however, have experienced dramatic growth.
‘If you find the (absolute) number goes down, it’s either because they changed their names or they emigrated,’ Webber, author of the study, told Reuters.…
Milk Does Not ‘Do The Body Good’ … Monsanto’s Death Concoction
OK, Canada would NOT touch the stuff so why did the FDA here allow it on our shelf’s? Because there is a revolving door between the FDA, Monsanto & in some cases the Supreme Court. People like Clarence Thomas who use to be a Monsanto lawyer and now a Supreme Court judge allow Monsanto to get away with murder — literally:
Bill Maher Talks About Ending the American Empire
At the end of his “New Rules” segment on the March 27, 2009 episode featuring Bill Bradley, Mos Def, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Hitchens:
If Atheists Ruled the World…
All text taken directly from online Christian fundamentalist forums:
Vexing Computer Worm to Evolve on April Fool’s Day
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP): A tenacious computer worm which has wriggled its way onto machines worldwide is set to evolve on April Fool’s Day, becoming harder to exterminate but not expected to wreak havoc.
A task force assembled by Microsoft has been working to stamp out the worm, referred to as Conficker or DownAdUP, and the US software colossus has placed a bounty of 250,000 dollars on the heads of those responsible for the threat.
The worm is programmed to modify itself on Wednesday to become harder to stop, according to Trend Micro threat researcher Paul Ferguson, who is part of the Conficker task force. “There is no evidence of it going into attack mode or dropping any particular payload on April 1st,” Ferguson said in an interview.
“What people controlling the botnet are doing is building in survivability because of efforts by the good guys to lessen the harm of this thing.” The…
George Soros, The Man Who Broke The Bank, Sees A Global Meltdown
George Soros was 13 when the Nazis invaded his homeland of Hungary. As a Jew, he was forced to adopt a false identity and live separately from his parents in Budapest. Instead of being traumatised by the experience, though, he found the danger exhilarating. “It was high adventure,” he says, “like living through Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Sixty-five years later, he still thrives on danger. He famously made $1 billion on Black Wednesday by shorting the pound, earning him the label of “the man who broke the Bank of England”. Last year, as the world tipped into financial chaos, Mr Soros pocketed another $1.1 billion by correctly predicting the downturn. “I’m an expert in crises,” he says…
This recession, he explains, is a “once-in-a-lifetime event”, particularly in Britain. “This is a crisis unlike any other. It’s a total collapse of the financial system with tremendous implications for everyday life. On previous…
Chinese “Ghostnet” Network Spies On Dalai Lama, Foreign Governments
Nearly 1,300 computers in more than 100 countries have been attacked and have become part of a computer espionage network apparently based in China, security experts alleged in two reports Sunday.
Computers — including machines at NATO, governments and embassies — are infected with software that lets attackers gain complete control of them, according to the reports. One was issued by the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies in conjunction with the Ottawa, Canada-based think tank The SecDev Group; the second came from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Researchers have dubbed the network GhostNet. The network can not only search a computer but see and hear the people using it, according to the Canadian report.
“GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras,” the report says.
The discovery of GhostNet grew out of…
Randomness: Products in Search of a Market Style
The best in weird news, odd people, and funny events from across the globe. Proving once again that the Darwin principle lives in all of us.
Obama, Your Online Audience are the Ones that Raised Half a Billion Dollars to Put You in Power
Aside from this statement showing what a complete hypocrite he has become in just a short few weeks in power, it also shows that he is not only ungrateful to those individuals who donated money to him during these brutal economic times, but that he is in power to maintain the status quo.
If you recall, because obviously Obama doesn’t, “Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House, dramatically ushering in a new digital era in presidential fundraising.”
“In an exclusive interview with the Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama’s online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than…
Glenn Beck and Larry the Dead Fish
Glenn Beck makes the point of America printing money to the tune of trillions of dollars while other stories knock it off the news:
Fox News Secedes From America
Newscorpse: It was just a matter of time. With all of the white-hot, ultra-hyperbolic invective radiating from Fox News screens across the land, there was really no escaping the obvious end game.
The usual suspects in the Fox Confederacy have been so filled with revulsion by the neo-Socialist path that they believe the country is on, that they can no longer abide nor accept it. So now Fox News is preparing to depart from the union with a fanfare, a blast of light, a loud swoosh and gong. And an advertising campaign.
On first viewing of this ad I thought it may have been a joke akin to the Colbert Nation. It begins by declaring that “It’s time to say ‘NO’ to biased media.”
Was Fox News coming clean and denouncing itself? No such luck. It was just that old “fair and balanced” Foxian doublespeak. Instead, Fox was announcing the birth of a…
404’s Greatest Hits
Trippy CD. Download it at their site.
From the site: Pawn shop and second hand guitars, toy keyboards used for uses not meant to be. Garages, basements and bedrooms under the satellite stars. Away from the world and into the sound, overflowing boxes of cassette tapes.
Late for everything but always on time for the 404.
Why Watchmen Failed…
Every time a new superhero blockbuster comes out, it’s as if a comic-book shop has exploded, showering chunks of itself across the country: bat-logo on a billboard here, Superman on the subway there, Spider-Man in the supermarket checkout line. The campaign for the latest superhero movie, Watchmen, is a bit of a buzzkill, however, because alongside the gorgeously angst-laden posters of people sulking in the rain, we have to listen to endless defensive lectures on the “importance” and “influence” of this comic book. It was the only comic book included in Time magazine’s list of 100 best English-language novels! People have written respectfully about it in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It’s a masterpiece!
It’s also a failure.
How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
Brandon Keim: WIRED: In troubled economic times, it’s often hard to convince the government to fund space science. Heck, at least those much-studied fruit flies live on our planet. But there’s one field of research that the public should be happy to support: keeping the Earth from being pummeled by asteroids. And there is no shortage of ideas for how to do this.
Earlier this month, a skyscraper-sized asteroid passed within 50,000 miles of Earth — a galactic hair’s breadth separating the planet from an impact like one that flattened 800 square miles of Siberian tundra in 1908.
Then there’s an asteroid spotted in 2004 and called Apophis. Astronomers originally thought it might hit Earth in 2029. Then they decided that it couldn’t. Finally they moved back the clock to 2036.
The uncertainty is understandable, but not exactly reassuring. And even if Apophis misses, some other rock big enough to put a serious…
Pirate Radio USA
Pirate Radio USA is a feature length digital documentary about the underground world of illegal radio in America, where people play what they want and say what they want—unless the FCC catches them.
DJ’s Him and Her, from their live Pirate Radio USA Studio, take you on a rock–n-roll journey inside rogue radio stations across the country to see why Americans defy Federal Law to free the radio airwaves.
On the way see the rise of Big Media, the growth of Citizen Media to encounter it, and witness their showdown over the truth during the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle.
Pirate Radio USA was broadcast — or really microcast — with a 4 watt transmitter live, as an uninterrupted radio program. The effect will be to ‘see’ a live pirate radio microcast about pirate radio: a first.
See the battle to free the airwaves live — and find out the real price of…
Preparing for Civil Unrest in America
Grim article, but seems lees and less improbable as the truth becomes apparent. See the Rolling stone article “The Big Takeover” posted elsewhere on this site.
Flick Your Switch Off for Earth Hour
Trystan L. Bass: Do you want to show you care about energy conservation? Simply switch off your lights on March 28 from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., local time.
This is Earth Hour, and Saturday is the third annual worldwide event. Earth Hour is both a symbolic act and the start of a practical habit.
Millions of homes and businesses and hundreds of major landmarks will go dark for one hour to show that energy conservation is important and to send this message to political leaders attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009.
At the same time, Earth Hour reminds each of us how easy it is to conserve — just turn off non-essential lights and electronics to reduce our own power consumption.
Lighting accounts for about 11 percent of a typical American home’s energy bills, while computers and electronics add another 9 percent. So by shutting off these things when we’re…
Freeman Dyson, Revered Scientist, Becomes Global-Warming Heretic
NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF, NY Times:
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars.
Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him.
Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”
Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow.
Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared…
