flickering pictures

Here’s something you didn’t need to know - the last ten Google search terms that led visitors to flickeringpictures.com:
15:28:15 - “united steel workers of montreal
14:51:53 - flickering pictures
13:03:41 - flickering pictures
12:16:19 - italy bans grabbing of genitals
11:58:57 - italy bans grabbing of genitals
11:15:42 - subprime primer stickmen
10:33:53 - Italian court bans crotch grabbing
10:30:31 - […]

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“In a landmark judgement with far-reaching social implications, Italy’s highest appeals court has ruled it is a criminal offence for Italian men to touch their genitals in public.”

How’s that for a lead paragraph? The Guardian reports that:

“The judges of the court of cassation stressed that the ban did not just apply to brazen crotch-scratching, […]

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An excellent bit of satire by the good people at The Onion - and all the more brilliant because it’s not altogether unbelievable.
Diebold, incidentally, builds electronic voting machines for U.S. elections. The machines can apparently be hacked, rigged or otherwise tampered with to ensure a candidate’s victory. Nothing satirical about that - here’s […]

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An entertaining - and surprisingly informative - slideshow that explains what caused the global subprime mortgage crisis.
Via boingboing

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Cory Doctorow is a columnist, boingboing.net contributor and all-around superhero, and his latest Guardian piece on intellectual property makes a lot of sense. In it, he argues that “if we’re going to achieve a lasting peace in the knowledge wars, it’s time to set property aside, time to start recognising that knowledge - valuable, […]

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In 1999, Napster was launched, Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan played their final games, some guy named George W. Bush decided to run for president, and 10,000 Kosovars were massacred in what George Robertson, then the UK’s defence secretary, called genocide. Three thousand more were declared missing and never found, and nearly half of […]

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It turns out that Americans were debating waterboarding over 100 years ago, according to a really interesting New Yorker article. Apparently, U.S. troops were using the technique to extract information during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War.

“A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, […]

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