Silly/Odd News Stories from around the World

[mg1942]

Can the Higher Authority save the Detroit 3?

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/08/d...f-hybrid-suvs/

[kyon.haruhi.suzumiya]

Originally Posted by mg1942

Can the Higher Authority save the Detroit 3?

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/08/d...f-hybrid-suvs/

The LORD hath spoken! He is miffed with how extra-large SUVs are polluting the environment! (After all, that's the kind of cars Detroit had been producing for so long!)

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

So is killing a character on-screen murder?

I'd like to turn myself in, because while hallucinating as a troll shaman or a carjacker or a dark elf, I've killed thousands of " fictional characters" persons over the years.

Good lord, the Australian judge is a retarded idiot and fails at basic philosophy much less the rule-of-law.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by einhorn303

A man charged over cartoons showing sex acts involving children modelled on The Simpsons characters has failed to have his child pornography convictions overturned.

In the NSW Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Michael Adams ruled a fictional cartoon character was a "person" within the meaning of the relevant state and Commonwealth laws.

In February, Alan John McEwan was convicted in Parramatta Local Court of possessing child pornography and using his computer to access child pornography.

"The alleged pornography comprised a series of cartoons depicting figures modelled on members of the television animated series The Simpsons," the judge said.

The cartoons showed characters like Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson having sex.

The man was convicted and fined $3,000 and placed on a good behaviour bond.

"In my view, the magistrate was correct in determining that, in respect of both the Commonwealth and the NSW offences, the word 'person' included fictional or imaginary characters ...," the judge said.

"... the mere fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was not a 'person'."

In dismissing the appeal, the judge ordered each party to pay its own legal costs as this was the first case dealing with this "difficult" issue.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/...ld-porn-judge/

Further proof that laws against so called ¨virtual child pornography¨ will lead to nothing but insanity.

so if a WoW character kills another WoW character the killer WoW character Player is now a murder?

and since the judge consider a 2d character real people under the law, is he willing to perform a marriage ceremony for Japanese Otaku and thier 2d girlfriend?

[GuidoHunter_Toki]

Originally Posted by Xellos-_^

so if a WoW character kills another WoW character the killer WoW character Player is now a murder?

and since the judge consider a 2d character real people under the law, is he willing to perform a marriage ceremony for Japanese Otaku and thier 2d girlfriend?

Taking things to the extreme I'd say.

Then so is every lewd drawing scrawled by a horny 14 year old porn? Millions of people now living are Child Pornographers.

[james0246]

In retrospect, after I got past my initial outrage, I had to wonder how bad the defense attorney was that he/she allowed the stupid arguments of the prosecutor to sway the jury/judge in the Simpson's nudity case? I mean, just the few comments addressed in this thread could have been used to identify the sheer silliness of the prosecutors argument. So, how bad was the defense attorney that he/she lost this case ?

[Vexx]

Or that the judge was really off his rocker in letting his personal revulsion outweigh jurisprudence.

[Shadow Kira01]

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...elcome_to.html



US President George W. Bush: "Welcome to my hanging".

[ganbaru]

about the jugement in Australia:
At least, he was only ''fined $3,000 and placed on a good behaviour bond.''
I hope than the real thing would haved got him much more than that.

[WanderingKnight]

At least, he was only ''fined $3,000 and placed on a good behaviour bond.''

It's not just that. The guy was convicted for child pornography, and that stains means a lot more than just the 3000 bucks.

They have effectively ruined his life forever.

[OMchan]

Whoa...

Woman Reportedly Goes Deaf In One Ear After Extremely Passionate Kiss
Officials in southern China say a woman has temporarily lost her hearing, after her boyfriend planted such an exceptionally strong wet one on her that it ruptured her eardrum.

Click!

[james0246]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

It's not just that. The guy was convicted for child pornography, and that stains means a lot more than just the 3000 bucks.

They have effectively ruined his life forever.

The real question is...Will he ever watch The Simpsons again ?

[TinyRedLeaf]

Dogs have sense of fairness, studies show

Vienna, Austria (Dec 10, 2008): No fair! What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something. Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.

Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward — say, a sausage — they'll happily keep at it. But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.

Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness. "Animals react to inequity," said Ms Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who leads a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."

Ms Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.

In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's (Dec 9) edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ms Range and her colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw" to place their paw in the hand of a researcher.

Those that refused at the start — and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs — were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.

The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other. The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received. When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

When both got a reward all was well.

Interestingly, the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

- AP

[mg1942]

Originally Posted by einhorn303

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/...ld-porn-judge/

It doesn't say how he got caught...
My guess is that Australia's latest technology is what got him in trouble.

Spoiler for Coming soon to major U.S. ISPs!:

CopyRouter wants to silently stand between users and child pornography

Australian company Brilliant Digital Entertainment Ltd. – known formerly as Altnet – claims it can stop child pornography on the internet with CopyRouter, the new tool it is pitching (PDF) to ISPs and law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Brilliant Digital says CopyRouter sits in between an ISP’s subscribers and their internet connection, monitoring all data that passes through for illegal files defined by a hash list provided by law enforcement, copyright holders, or subscribers’ own submissions. CopyRouter uses deep packet inspection to peek inside the contents of connections, and Brilliant Digital says it can use this to monitor e-mail attachments, HTTP downloads, and peer-to-peer protocols like Gnutella or FastTrack.

When CopyRouter detects someone trying to download child pornography, it intercepts the connection and replaces the data in transit with an alternate file – presumably one provided by law enforcement. A PowerPoint presentation (PDF), given to a number of groups including AOL, the administration of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), portrays simulated examples where CopyRouter replaced a blacklisted file with a warning from law enforcement – denying the downloader the material he or she originally requested and adding the attempt, sans any information on who requested what, to a log file.

More importantly, Brilliant Digital claims CopyRouter is able to beat countermeasures. Connection handshakes that negotiate things like compression or encryption – common techniques that are sometimes used to fool deep packet inspection – are silently manipulated so that connection is actually read as plain text, unbeknownst to either party.

“We have been working on it for some time,” says Brilliant Digital’s Michael Speck, commercial manager for the company’s law enforcement products, in an interview with MSNBC. “We've been in negotiations with ISPs and law enforcement agencies and content owners.”

Before the company renamed itself to Brilliant Digital, it developed and led a variety of anti-piracy initiatives under the name Altnet; the hash-based filtering system it devised in CopyRouter appears to be the spiritual successor to a similar technology it pitched to music organizations in 2006.

Further back, the company published a controversial add-on packaged with file-sharing client KaZaA, of which some eventually labeled as spyware.

Both the anti-piracy tech and CopyRouter include numerous references to a “Global File Registry,” which Brilliant Digital intends to use as a private clearinghouse for hashcodes of contraband data. GlobalFileRegistry.com includes advertising text targeted at both music organizations such as the RIAA and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.

One of the largest legal hurdles revolves around who compiles the hashlist. If the list is privately maintained, then ISPs have more freedom to report CopyRouter’s findings to the authorities, because its monitoring can be worked into subscriber agreements. If the government steps in at that stage, it could run afoul of U.S. communications and privacy laws, as well as the Constitution.

[Vexx]

Ah the latest scamware..... what a frigging legal minefield that is....

[othera]

I demand i be allowed to marry my posters.

that is just screwed tbh.

[mg1942]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Ah the latest scamware..... what a frigging legal minefield that is....

I guess the richest members/states of the Commonwealth will adopt that technology.

In USA? I think AOL wants to adopt it, but I think they'll wait for mature/fool-proof version.

[kyon.haruhi.suzumiya]

Originally Posted by mg1942

I guess the richest members/states of the Commonwealth will adopt that technology.

In USA? I think AOL wants to adopt it, but I think they'll wait for mature/fool-proof version.

Hm. Singapore will be next, mark my words.

BUT IT IS a Commonwealth member, and rich at that, compared to some members.

[mg1942]

... and the Government will pass it to private companies and NGOs to do the dirty work.

[kyon.haruhi.suzumiya]

Originally Posted by mg1942

... and the Government will pass it to private companies and NGOs to do the dirty work.

Just like every other rich Commonwealth country. And fail epic. THe recycling program was under a private operator at first, and failed like crap. Now Sembcorp gotta take over.