A woman in Germany who became pregnant after an online sex auction has won a court battle to force the Web site that hosted the sale to reveal the names of the winners, so she can find out who’s the father.

Six different men won Internet auctions to have sex with the woman in April and May last year. They were only known to her by their online names said a spokesman for a court in the southwestern city of Stuttgart.

“The woman wanted to discover which one of the men had made her pregnant,” the spokesman said. “So she needed their contact details. Of course, if they’re not willing to go along with the gene test, she’ll have to take them to court.”

So much for signing waivers, eh?

I don’t have a right to search you… but you won’t mind, will you?

An Ontario (Canada) judge has ruled that unlawful search and seizures are now admissible in the interest of fighting crime.

The Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday approved the use of evidence obtained through flagrant police misconduct, saying any black eye caused to the justice system is outweighed by public interest in prosecuting a serious crime.

In a decision that even one of their fellow judges finds intolerable, a majority of the court upheld a trial judge’s decision to admit evidence of 35 kilos of cocaine found in Bradley Harrison’s rented SUV – despite the judge’s finding an OPP officer had no legal grounds to stop the vehicle, seriously infringed the Toronto man’s Charter rights and misled a court while trying to justify his actions.

The 2-1 ruling is the latest in a line of recent decisions in which the court has been accused of weakening Charter protections by refusing to exclude evidence obtained unlawfully. In a case last fall involving a gun found in a backpack at Westview Centennial Secondary School, the court said throwing out reliable evidence because of Charter violations must be balanced against public concerns about escalating gun violence.

The officer stated that his integrity was at stake when deciding whether to pull over the driver or not.

Click pic for more

Is your laptop worth $54 million? Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C., is suing Richfield-based Best Buy for that amount after it lost her laptop computer while it was in for repairs.

Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday, filed a negligence lawsuit suit against the company in Washington Superior Court on Nov. 16, seeking fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French said in an e-mail that Campbell “was offered and collected $1,110.35” as well as “a $500 gift card for her inconvenience.”

According to Campbell’s blog at bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com, Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost.

Most computer service shops will have you sign a waiver that clearly states they aren’t responsible for lost data. While I sympathize with her situation, this is ridiculous. Maybe next time, she’ll take it to a professional.

Hillary will win the primary against Obama. Despite the fact that Obama won five states last Saturday, is pulling in more money, and is gaining momentum, Hillary still has huge wins in Florida and Michigan in her back pocket. I know what you’re saying: The DNC are keeping those delegates out. And heck, it wouldn’t be fair because Obama’s name was not even on the ballot in Michigan, right? Wrong.

If needed it will happen. She started laying the groundwork last month:

“I hear all the time from people in Florida and Michigan that they want their voices heard in selecting the Democratic nominee,” the New York senator said in a statement. “I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election, and so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan.”

Or how about this tidbit,

“the state (Florida) party is going ahead with congressional-district caucuses on March 1 to pick the people it plans to send to Denver next summer.”

Why would Florida do that unless there was at least a small chance those delegates were going?

So even if Obama does get more legitimate delegates, Hillary will ensure that those from Florida and Michigan are allowed in, killing his chances. In fact, this whole thing could have been a set-up to begin with. Why else did she keep her name on the Michigan ballot unless she knew it’d come into play later? She’s essentially playing poker with cards up her sleeves.

And don’t even get me started on how she’s using her daughter to influence the super delegates and playing the race card to destroy Obama’s chances among white and Hispanics.

So I’m looking at my email box and go to the toolbar to go back a page and…what the?!?! All that is there is the reload button. I wonder how many people will be unable to fix this problem? I know this is still beta code, but still!

The route to re-installing the back and forth arrows is convoluted if you ask me. You go up to VIEW then click on toolbars then click on customize then drag and drop the function from the menu onto the toolbar. Most people would expect to find this sort of thing under the TOOLS menu rather than the VIEW menu I think.

Ay Caramba!

 
 
 
Parents protest test in English :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education — It might help if they let the kids speak English in public once in a while.

During a news conference Tuesday at the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, about two dozen Latino parents charged that the test mandate is “unfair,’’ “anti-immigrant’’ and “anti-bilingual education.’’

“This is a way of attacking children who don’t understand the language,’’ said Martinez, who is pushing a resolution to delay the test for a year.

Previously, Illinois kids in bilingual education programs for less than three years took an alternative state test in English.

But last October federal education officials ruled that test did not meet federal No Child Left Behind standards. They ordered Illinois bilingual education students who have been in public schools for more than a year to take the same tests native English speakers take, starting March 3.

Speaking through a Spanish-English translator, parent Erika Soto said her third-grade daughter is “very smart, but because of this test, she is going to be labeled a failure. So how is she going to feel?’’

Armed police arrested a man listening to his MP3 player and took a sample of his DNA after after a fellow commuter mistook his music player for a gun.

Darren Nixon, 28, had been waiting at a bus stop in Stoke-on-Trent on his way home from work on Saturday afternoon when a woman saw him reach into his pocket and take out his black Phillips MP3 player. She thought it was a pistol and called 999.

Police then tracked Nixon using CCTV. When he got off the bus, armed officers surrounded him. He was then driven to a police station, kept in a cell and had his fingerprints, photograph and DNA taken.

He was freed when Staffordshire police realised it was a false alarm. Nixon will now have his DNA stored on a national database for life…

The Liberal Democrats, who are campaigning to have DNA records of innocent people destroyed, say the national DNA database now holds over 3m records which are kept for life, an estimated 125,000 of which belong to people who were neither cautioned or charged.

Ah, but, think of how safe everyone is.

The three largest newspapers in Denmark are reprinting this cartoon in support of freedom of expression.

Three men were arrested in Denmark accused of plotting to murder a cartoonist, two years after a dozen cartoons lampooning Islamic fundamentalism sparked violent demonstrations around the world.

The target was said to be Kurt Westergaard, 73, a staff cartoonist on Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons. Westergaard’s drawings depicted the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban and a burning fuse.

Police said they arrested the men while the plot to kill Westergaard was still in the planning stage. The chief of the Security and Intelligence Service, Jakob Scharf, said the arrests came after a long period of surveillance. They were intended, he said “to prevent a terror-related assassination of one of the cartoonists behind the cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed”.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Prime Minister, said: “Unfortunately… there are in Denmark groups of extremists that do not acknowledge and respect the principles on which Danish democracy is built. In Denmark, we have freedom not only to think and talk, but also to draw.”

Because of death threats, Westergaard and his wife Gitte have been provided with heavy police protection for the past three months and are moved frequently to secret locations.

Believe it or not, the picture above is from the patent application.

If one has at his disposition a robust display which can be thrown around, a whole new range of computer games can be designed. The electronic gaming system comprises: a robust, movable display (101); a game controller(103), arranged to generate a game scenario, comprising generation of pictures to be displayed on the robust movable display (101); and a trajectory mapping unit (105), arranged to map a virtual trajectory in space-time of a virtual world in the game scenario, with at least two of the pictures with unequal picture content corresponding to different locations of the virtual space-time trajectory, to a real trajectory of the robust movable display (101) in real space, so that at an appropriate moment the two of the pictures are displayed on the robust movable display (101).

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

If Al Qaeda is fighting us because they hate our freedoms, as President Bush often says, then they’re winning the war. Pretty soon, we won’t have any more freedoms for them to hate.

Scratch the Fourth Amendment off the list of freedoms that we thought we had.

Pressured by a huge lobbying effort by Big Telecom and by fears of being painted as weak on terrorism, the Democratic-controlled Senate has rolled over on your right to privacy, abandoning legislation that would enforce the constitutional requirements of probable cause and due process of law before the phone companies can help the government spy on you by turning over your phone records, emails and other sensitive information…

On Tuesday, the Senate, with the backing of 18 Democrats and every Republican, defeated attempts by Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold to hold the telecom companies accountable for their past illegal conduct…

Chalk up another victory for the terrorists, who hate our freedom. So too, apparently, does the U.S. government.