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A Zurich University team has named a newly-discovered species of lemur after comedian John Cleese. Cleese has been a long time spokesman and campaigner for the endangered animals. The new species, avahi cleesei, declined comment, but did hit Michael Palin in the head with a halibut.

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Via Boing Boing, a link to a flame against the developers of Sony’s rootkit. (NSFW)

MY GOD MAN!!! Do you realize what you’re doing? DO you? What kind of HONEY BITCH TOOL have you become? Have you no shame? None at all?

Look at you. Look at yourself. Look at what you’ve BECOME. Your job is writing code to BREAK PEOPLE’S COMPUTERS if they dare to put a CELINE DION CD into their disk drive. Is this what you always wanted? Is this what you went to school for? Is this what we’ve all — all of us, every other hacker and programmer and geek and computer person — is this what we’ve all helped you to do?

It goes on… funny stuff and so true.

Huzzah to the New York Times for jumping on the latest trend from the Fourth Estate; Blogs aren’t just annoying; they’re actually bad for society. Just a few, brief years ago, flash mobs were the source of all those riots at G8 and Seattle. Now, the French riots are the fault of evil 14-year old bloggers. And these evil bloggers are getting off after being arrested because for “procedural reasons”. It almost begs for a suspension of those ridiculous laws so we can round up all those bloggers and hold them.

Why do reporters always have to reach for an angle to blame the technology? If this was 1517, the New York Times would be questioning the need for nails as they aid disruptive elements such as Martin Luther in the nailing of theses to the doors of church doors. They would then have to draw a line from the 1440s and blame not just Luther, but Gutenberg as well for enabling “anyone who can afford one” the ability to print virtually unlimited amounts of material.

Here’s a very brief rundown for all the Fourth Estaters who don’t get it: It you’re focusing on the technology, you’re missing the story. People don’t riot so they can post about it on the French version of LiveJournal. People riot because of societal problems. People riot because no one is listening to them. People riot because reporters who try to blame the delivery system aren’t doing their job and telling the real story.

My Christmas came early this year, courtesy of Amazon’s kick-ass Amazon Prime service ($79 for unlimited two-day shipping). I got a new set of cookware from J–, who, despite the unintentional gifting, has accepted that I love my gift and will count it as a gift when the appropriate day arrives. (UPS left it on our porch and it was shipped in the original box; hard not to know what is was.)

Of course, since I had a slowly dating set of cookware, I had to get rid of it. Instead of chucking it, I FreeCycled it. The Ann Arbor FreeCycle group is very active and a great place to offload some of those things that aren’t worth throwing out, but you don’t use. I’ve used it twice, both offers, and had a response within minutes.

Detroit deserves everything it has coming to it after re-electing Kwame Kilpatrick. The thug mentality and corruption in Detroit will run wild right up until the whole city goes into receivership. The fallout will be felt statewide.

Detroit is facing a projected deficit of $200 million in its $1.4-billion general fund budget, and Kilpatrick has delayed making deep cuts or layoffs until after the election. Unless Kilpatrick can perform a financial miracle in the next eight weeks, he may find paying city workers and vendors and warding off state oversight of city finances his next great challenge.

This is the same deficit he’s been unable to fix in the previous four years. Maybe the voters are right and he needs “another chance”. The first few hundred chances just weren’t enough. Idiots. Note to Lansing, start prepping the finance manager you’re going to have to appoint when the City goes into receivership. The mayor’s own finance director told the City Council that, barring significant cuts, the City will run out of money before the holidays.

In an unrelated note, 33% of Detroiters want to leave the City, preferably for another state. Surprise, surprise.

The city’s population has shrunk by half in the last 50 years. About 10,000 to 12,000 residents leave yearly, and the city’s population is now around 900,000.

This is terrible day for Michigan. Our largest City is on the brink of financial disaster and the person in charge, again, is the same person who has been unable to fix anything previously. I believe that’s the definition of insanity.

I know quoting The Onion is low-level slogging, but this is so damn funny, I laughed out loud.

Alabama State Senator Hank Erwin, one of the hundreds of emotional guests at Bush’s $5,000-a-plate dinner, proposed a toast, saying, “If I may paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King… ‘I am free at last, free at last—thank God almighty, I’m free at last to stop thinking about civil rights.’”

And the sad thing is, someone out there will believe this.

The Death Of Rosa Parks – The Onion

These guys make alternate endings to blockbuster movies. What should Han have done at the end of Episode 4? Why do all the Smith’s just stand there in Matrix Revolutions? Just what the hell is going on in Blair Witch? Download the movies and find out. (Help the site out and use BitTorrent; I highly recommend utorrent (microtorrent)).

The Official How It Should Have Ended Website

I hacked the CVS disposable camera tonight. It was kind of fun, aside from the fact that I totally suck at soldering. I used the instructions at Make and Hack a Day.

Instructions are all over the place to hack this camera, so it’s not like I was doing any actual exploration, but I’ve never done a much hardware hacking, so this was a fun little project. I highly recommend the Make instructions.

Tips for anyone thinking of doing this:

1. Get a good soldering iron. Mine blows, but it cost $5. You get what you pay for.
2. Practice soldering on something you don’t care about. My first and only experience soldering was this project.
3. eBay is your friend. Aside from the camera, which I found on sale, the Palm connecter can be had on eBay for less than $10 shipped.
4. Don’t expect too much. It’s a $25 camcorder. The quality is so-so. Our house is a little dark and the picture quality isn’t great. It’s a nifty little toy, but that’s about it.
5. Pets hate camcorders. At least ours do.

Want to be healthier? Drink more beer, and the more hops the better.

It turns out that beer hops contain a unique micronutrient that inhibits cancer-causing enzymes. Hops are plants used in beer to give it aroma, flavor and bitterness.

“It clearly has some interesting chemo-preventive properties, and the only way people are getting any of it right now is through beer consumption,” [Fred Stevens, an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry at Oregon State’s College of Pharmacy] said.

Praise God and pass the IPA.

ABC News: Drinker’s Delight: Beer May Fight Disease

El Edwards, the voice of AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail” announcement, is selling customized WAV files on his web site. For $10, you can have El say “You’ve Got Mail, Ryan”.

Anyone know of any remixes of this guy’s work?

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